Man Ah Warrior

"He might have heard what people have always heard in strange music: the call of another life."

With anyone else but Mary Weiss as a lead singer, the doom in Shangri-Las songs might have turned into a joke, but it never happened: every time, whether in “Remember,” “Give Us Your Blessings,” “Out in the Streets,” “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” or “Past, Present, and Future,” the singer was a different person, starting from the beginning, telling her story as far as it would go, which was never very far. Their songs, like Winehouse’s, were all locked doors, doors that locked you out or that you locked yourself from the inside.

"'My Father's House' was decked out in formal folk regalia, pious and biblical as a headstone: 'Where our sins lie unatoned.'"