Wow! So while those Radiohead rumors turned out to be a hoax on Friday, Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protests last night and played eight songs on acoustic guitar. While I'm all for the broadest goal of economic equality, now I mostly hope Jeff Mangum makes a new album.

In the car, my friend Jonathan and I talked about my kids, and his job, and how we feel old all the time. He’d come up that morning from North Carolina, where we once lived together, to come to the concert with me; now we were driving together from Arlington to Baltimore in a CRV whose backseat was dense with child-safety seats and princess books. READ MORE

This seems like something you might want to jump on: "In September of 2006, the Wordless Music series presented its first concert at the 250-capacity Good Shepherd Faith Church on West 66th Street in New York City. Five years later, we are slightly shocked and humbled to announce the start of our 5th anniversary season with a true musical great: Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, performing his first U.S. live shows since 1998, and in two of the country's great acoustical treasures: on Saturday, September 10, at the 1,050-capacity Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory in Boston; and on Friday, September 9, at an historic 1,150-capacity venue to be announced next week. Tickets for these concerts will be $35 and open to audience members of all ages. A small number of tickets for the Jordan Hall concert go on presale next Friday, February 25 at 10am by phone, online, and (with no service charges) at the Jordan Hall box office; the remaining Jordan Hall tickets will be sold at the same outlets starting at 10am on Saturday, February 26. Ticket info for September 9's concert will be disclosed....imminently."

• Remember that you’re seeing the first full-length concert in over a decade from the man behind one of the greatest albums of the '90s (if not the greatest) at the greatest music festival in the country. So, be happy. READ MORE

So, you know Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum reappeared last year, after going underground for a decade after making what some people believe (what this person believes) is one of the ten-or-twenty-or-so greatest albums of all time, ever, by anyone. The reappearance was brief. And there's been no new music. But Merge Records recently rereleased In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as well as the band's other, slightly less perfect album, On Avery Island. And also, in celebration, a pair of video clips of Mangum playing solo at the Knitting Factory in 1998. The footage is, umm, intense. He is like a cross between John Fogerty in 1969 and Jack Nicholson, all frozen solid at the end of The Shining. When he open his mouth to holler, you can almost see his eyes rolling back in his head like a shark. Like he is feeding on his bonkers. And he is so, so, so good.