One of the many unexpected outcomes of writing a book about your musical preferences is that anyone bored enough can recommend new songs and bands to you based on what you’ve told them you’ve liked all your life. Often these recommendations lead to nothing: You click on a link, listen to a song that invariably involves fiddles or harps, and decide that, no, this band is not for me — and why would it be, because I fucking hate fiddles and harps and I made that pretty damn clear in my book. But very, very occasionally these unsolicited tips pay off and you’ve found another band about which a Natalie Portman character would probably say something anger-making but also spot-on.

I came across the Prids this way, and it shames me that I didn’t find them earlier, like in 2004, when they played at the venue a block away from my apartment. A dutiful reader wrote me in early ’08 to say that Mistina, the Portland-based band’s bassist, had been talking my book up after one of their gigs; being an egomaniac, the Prids immediately became my favorite new group. But I hadn’t heard their music yet and was secretly worried that they sucked and I’d have to pretend to like a crappy band just because its bassist liked something I wrote.

Thankfully, the Prids do not suck and in fact are pretty amazing and I have been hoping to lure them out to New York in the near future because they haven’t played here since ’06 (that’s just wrong!). I still think it’ll happen in the near future, but maybe now not as soon as I’d like because of something kind of nuts that happened to them last month. This photo pretty much explains it all.

Luckily everyone is alive and expected to make a fully recovery. But a few band members don’t have health insurance and the injuries piled up (an airlift was involved!) and their van was totalled and lots of musical equipment shredded or lost. Their friends have set up a PayPal account, which you can find on the Prids homepage here. While totally depressing, this tragedy is also so incredibly rock n’ roll that you kind of owe them a few bones to repay them for having gone through all this for your amazement. And for casting the Asian dude in the video for “Let It Go” (see below; he debuts 1 minute 32 seconds in). Pay up, suckers.

WHY I’M ANGRY TODAY
Still no call from Jeopardy!