Elizabeth Nelson

That voice you hear, flatly declarative, wry, and verbose, belongs to Elizabeth Nelson, lead singer and chief songwriter for The Paranoid Style.

Five albums into their career, the band exudes a cocky confidence in its ability to use rock songs as vehicles for both social commentary and personal angst.

On Shut Up and Deal, Nelson deploys a sarcastic country music melody to usher you into a tough lyric about the cynical compromises people make to succeed in life.

As a band, the paranoid style most often gets its creative spark from the tension between the guitar's garage rock roughness and Nelson's chatterbox eloquence.

On the song A Barrier to Entry, the band steals the hook from the Riviera's 1963 surf music smash California Sun as Nelson sings about the kinds of limits music snobs and cultural gatekeepers try to impose on our ideas of pop greatness.

Speaking of thumbing her nose at music snobs, in a recent piece she wrote for the literary magazine Southwest Review, Nelson says Linda Ronstadt's 1977 cover of The Rolling Stones' Tumbling Dice is, quote, my favorite recording of my favorite song of all time.

She makes a case for Ronstadt as a great singer of rock and roll, a notion with which I could not disagree more.

Ronstadt, a great pop ballad singer?

Yes, indeed.

A great rocker?

Come on.

But Nelson is such a provocative critic that I happily entertain her arguments.

In this same essay, she says her favorite song she's ever recorded with the paranoid style is this one she wrote for Ronstadt called It's a Dog's Breakfast.

Taking a cue from Nelson on Ronstadt, it occurs to me that there's a case to be made for Elizabeth Nelson as the best rock lyricist of this moment.

Her range of subject matter is prodigious, her technical command of imagery and form is impeccable, even when she's breaking the rules by cramming more words into a line than it would seem able to bear.

Take, for example, the joyfully rushed cadences of White Wine Whatever, a manic romp, or what Nelson calls a pure brawl, that invokes everything from Roxy Music to Jean-Luc Godard.

Known Associates is the Paranoid Style's most hard-rocking record, even as Elizabeth Nelson extends the reach of her influence.

Seems like everyone's got a podcast, but Nelson's, also called Known Associates, shows her to be a fine interrogator of fellow musicians and writers.

Nelson and The Paranoid Style are the most persuasive argument I know for the ongoing vitality of rock and roll.