Dinner's a strange affair - strangely successful.
B.T.'s strange case reveals a lot about the mind's extraordinary power — how it can control what we see and who we are.
It was on 2011's Strange Mercy, though, that she firmly based her inventive arrangements and violent emotions on sinuous, though abrasive guitar lines.
It was her latest solo release since 2011's Strange Mercy, though Clark collaborated with former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne on 2012's Love This Giant.
The New York Times, reviewing the tour for her third album, 2011's Strange Mercy, which peaked at No 19 in the US charts, noted Clark's "confounding" sound: "dry, compressed drums; neon synthesiser glare; aggressively processed guitars; calm, dispassionate singing".
Since 2011's Strange Mercy, she has embraced showboating so that makeup, costume and hair, combined with incrementally more funky pop music, would blow minds rather than merely tickle them.
Meeropol, who used the pen name Lewis Allan, was part of the radical socialist movement that attracted many New York Jews in the 1930's: "Strange Fruit" was written not from experience but from empathy.
Graham Coxon, back to his solo day job after Blur's big day out at Hyde Park, finds the most creative response to rock's history, gently bending and pulling apart The Who's hard R'n'B on "Feel Alright", and finishing with "I Don't Wanna Go On"'s strange, bucking take on country-blues.
In his wonderful early nonfiction books — 1950's "Local Color" and 1956's strange and hilarious "The Muses Are Heard," which covers a troupe of black actors in communist-era Moscow performing "Porgy and Bess," and the Russians sometimes-racist reaction to the performers — the writer used factual events as a jumping-off point to aid in his musings about outsiders.
