But Ass Ponys fans are in it for the songs--and the singer, which is a big reason there aren't many Ass Ponys fans. Neil Young is adduced in defense of Cleaver's high Midwestern whine, but Young sings pretty. Cleaver is love-him-or-leave-him expressive, locked into the vivid local colors of his lyrics--pained, tender, sardonic, fallible. Here he leads with two tales of lost women--one hanging in the barn, the other in love with a dead astronaut she never met--as acute and forlorn as anything in his book, and goes on to a dirt farmer's wife and a fetus's ghost and a guy who's very proud of his third nipple.

As with so many potential disappearing acts, it's clearly the words that keep Cleaver at it. He's literary, but with a difference, because he doesn't want to write short stories about these suffering fools. He prefers to grant them a reality that testifies physically to the weird spunk and rough shapeliness of lives that aren't altogether imprisoned by the illusions they're prey to. He wants to make them into rock and roll. Nothing else will do.

Spin, June, 2000