The voice gives him away, no doubt--a little bit fey, a little bit untrained, still finding out what it might be able to do, and nothing but sincere. Austin Stahl's Private Eleanor isn't anything new by a long shot--look no further than early-'90s lo-fi culture for the blueprint--yet Stahl adheres to the unwritten rules of bedroom songcraft better than anybody else in town. He writes personal songs that, because of their technicolor intimacy, mean as much to anybody else as they do to him. And like every good songwriting recluse, he fills his albums--this "official" My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions and the on-the-sly CDR Blood Maladies this year alone--with the peaks and valleys of good and bad, happy and sad, mundane and rad.