Probably the most subtle take on the challenge, as per the Moss Palace "don't give Vom what he wants!" songwriting credo, but the lead guitar riffs are given a really nice off-kilter feel by the rhythmic shift, so kudos for making the challenge work for you. I think this is possibly my favourite MP song of the challenge, with my only real critique is that the vocals sound very dry, it felt like a little more reverb / delay could have made things a little more interesting in a few spaces - mostly those long held notes where I kinda found myself wanting something different to happen.

Another precise vocal melody delivered with this dreamy quality, that's always the best part of your songs. I feel like the dryness of the vocal treatment works against it, a little more reverb would help it blend into the song a bit, especially with the amount of reverb on, like, everything else. I like the bit after "kiss"-- again this is a song with a lot of subtle details that really work well together. This is another excellent offering, of course, but it's very much in your safe zone if you will, a song that doesn't take a lot of chances, and in a round where others took more obvious risks, I think I find this song a little less interesting to listen to, in that I know what I'm getting, I'm not disappointed, but I wanted something more that would make this stand out a bit more in a semifinal round packed with other great songs. Sorry, no narcissistic story about my misspent youth here. Nice slide guitar again, I'm waiting for the Sonny Landreth licks though....

This is really charming and pretty (bonus points for vibraslap too!) It’s a really catchy, airy, feel-good kind of song. The arrangement works well but gets out of the way of the vocals, which are much more prominent. The vocal performance is lovely as usual, but something sounds slightly unnatural about the vocal processing to me, like there are maybe some artifacts on there from tuning or compression or something, and as the other judges I think have mentioned, vox seemed a bit too dry. The lyrics are simple but memorable (I particularly like the first verse and the way “quoting poetry” tumbles into the next line, and the knife thrower bit). I thought “you” and “do” was a bit of a weak rhyme--I had to look at the rhyme scheme of the previous verse to figure out what you were trying to do there, because from just listening to it, it didn’t sound like that part rhymed at all. I wouldn’t really have noticed the polyrhythmic elements without the liner notes, which at least means they were smoothly integrated, but I think it was also not very adventurous, and less compelling as a take on the challenge than some of the other songs that took a bolder approach.

Shadows: