The novel: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal-Christopher Moore
The song: Beulah-Me and Jesus Don't Talk Anymore

In a word: hilarious.

In some more words, the book is about what you'd expect it to be about from the title, spinning the story of Jesus (Joshua, actually) mostly throughout the first thirty years of his life with some wacky adventures and meetings with the three wise men, who end up being three bizarre, wonderful people of sorts. Told from the voice of Biff, Josh's BFF, a witty, women chasing guy who invented sarcasm, irony and the pencil, among other things, religion is suddenly pumped up to a place of so awesome! in my book. Anyway, Biff is writing this to complete the story, and staying with him in an hotel room is a soap oprah, wrestling, and general TV loving angel who wants to be Spiderman. Yeah, it's that kind of a book. And it is really brilliant on so many levels.

This Joshua feels much more authentic and easy to love with a personality, a sense of irony and general little mischeviousness. And Biff, an asshole, according to the kind and perfect angel, is even better. One of those character you adore to shreds and laugh and cry over, the sort who's charming and sweet and rude and annoying. A wonderful character.

Anyway, I loved, loved, loved this book (humor level is definitely up to David Sedaris, but with a totally different style). The realism is punched on with the life into the characters, and I'm sure I'll be entering into a train of Moore books in teh near future.

Beulah doesn't actually sound like the mood of the book, but I'm taking the easy way out and avoiding the problem by just skipping to the search for title related song type thing. The piano in this song is right on track, and signature Elephant 6 bounce and just right amount of pop vs. indie is a classic touch. There's so much drama in this song, so much contrast between the passionate and beautiful, the twinging, high guitars adding that vintage sound. The slightly unusual song structure also works in its favor, enclosing melodic, ballad like verses with a crashing chorus.