Sort of a companion track in my mind to Barbara Manning's "Don't Rewind" (both songs originally appeared on the 1990 AIDS charity compilation Acoustic Music Project), Sonya Hunter's "Paint" is more expansive and pretty than Manning's song, but it seems similarly tightly wound and oddly obsessive. Though Hunter is a folk-based singer-songwriter, she's not just another coffeehouse Phoebe: in other hands, this song's lyric, a fantasy about painting all the everyday objects in your sight, might be unbearably twee, but Hunter doesn't try to turn the idea into a metaphor for anything other than a surreal art project, to "beautify some things that beauty has stumbled by." The other keys to this song are the absolutely gorgeous chorus melody and ex-Wire Train/World Party guitarist Jeff Trott's trebly, psychedelic electric guitar, which adds an entirely different feel to what would otherwise be a completely straightforward acoustic folk song. If you ever lay hands on a copy of Favorite Short Stories, do so: as much as I love this song, it isn't even the best on the record.

-Stewart Mason