I recently discovered (and then promptly misplaced the URL for) a website that lists public television station schedules going back 40 or so years. This site allowed me to confirm something I’ve always held true: I started watching Doctor Who when I was six years old. That’s when WGBH Channel 2 in Boston began running the Tom Baker stories, and those episodes completely entranced me. I didn’t really understand them, but I loved them.

The show was then in its 17th year across the pond, but I didn’t know that. All I knew was that it starred a funny guy with big curls, big teeth and a big scarf, and it featured monsters and time travel and a blue box that was bigger on the inside. I honestly needed nothing else. Doctor Who aired on weekdays at 7 p.m., and my bedtime was extended to 7:30 p.m. because of it. I vividly remember watching the old episodes on the television in my parents’ room, and hearing my mom say “go to bed” as soon as the familiar closing credits theme began playing.

It’s amazing what sticks in the memory from such a young age. WGBH ran through Tom Baker’s seven-season run twice before moving on to Peter Davison, so I had a couple years with the man with the scarf. As I’ve bought these episodes on DVD over the past 10 years, I’ve been surprised by how much I remember. The creepy titular Robots of Death, for example, have stayed with me, as has the giant robot from (ahem) Robot. I can remember watching the deflating rubber mask from The Sontaran Experiment like it was yesterday. That freaked me out.

With all that, it was Baker’s successor, Peter Davison, that really hooked me. Davison is my Doctor, the one I hold dearest. Thanks to the advent of the VCR, I watched his stories over and over again as a pre-teen. I gasped when Adric died (and was earnestly taken in by the silent credits that played over his broken gold star for mathematics). I loved the Black Guardian stories, particularly Enlightenment. I remember even then thinking that Time-Flight was terrible, and too long by half. But The Caves of Androzani is still one of the most thrilling, moving things I’ve ever watched.

So yeah, Doctor Who hooked me early. I drifted away more than once – until 2005 or so, I’d never seen a Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy story, for instance. I watched the 1996 TV movie when it aired, and thought it was lousy. My fandom sprung back to life about eight years ago, as the revived series renewed my interest in the classic one. I now have every available Who DVD, and I watch and re-watch it more than any other show. Still, for most of that time, it’s been a pretty lonely thing. Between age 6 and age 36, I met maybe a dozen other Who fans.

And now, as the show turns 50 years old? They’re everywhere. And I couldn’t be happier.

Consider this. On Saturday, Nov. 23, the show’s 50th birthday, I watched the 75-minute anniversary special as it was simulcast in 93 countries around the world. Ten million people in the U.K. watched it as it aired, and it broke all records for BBC America. And two days later, I gathered a group of friends and saw the special again, in a sold-out movie theater. In 3-D. My little show is now a global phenomenon. And not just the new stuff, either, although that would be fine with me – I love the new seasons, and Matt Smith is my favorite Doctor since the early days. No, there were a lot of Tom Baker scarves on display on Monday. The old show has found its way into people’s hearts.

There could be no greater gift for me on the 50th anniversary. I can scarcely fathom it – Doctor Who is 50 years old, and is now more popular than ever. I credit the infinite possibility of the premise. Doctor Who is about a guy who can go anywhere in time and space, and can regenerate his body when he dies. The show can literally be anything. One week it will be a dense sci-fi drama with Davros and the Daleks, and the next a farce set in the waning days of the Roman Empire. If you don’t like an episode, wait a week. And if you don’t like the actor playing the Doctor, wait a couple years. Like everything else in this show, it will change. Doctor Who is about renewal and rebirth, and there’s no reason it can’t run forever.

Like anything with such a long history – we’re about to launch into season 34 – Doctor Who is inconsistent. In fact, inconsistency is sort of a trademark. This is the show that ran The Caves of Androzani and The Twin Dilemma back to back, after all. But I think we’re in a shining golden age right now. The current showrunner, Steven Moffat, is not only brilliant, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool fan who understands the show down to its DNA. And I mentioned Smith earlier. He’s got everything I look for in an actor playing the Doctor – he’s older than his years, he’s naturally quirky, and he has a surprising gravitas.

Together, Smith and Moffat have crafted three seasons of (mostly) excellent Doctor Who. It’s now a deeper and darker story than it’s been, but it still retains the core of the show – that eternal wonder at the vastness and beauty of the universe. Though the show is dark, Moffat doesn’t really do tragedy. The River Song arc, twisty as it was, ends in redemption, and the big sad ending for Amy and Rory found them sent back to the past to live their lives in peace and happiness.

And now, with the 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, Moffat has outdone himself. I’ll say up front that I think it’s the best episode of the show, period. I’ve seen it three times, and I keep thinking about moments of it and smiling. It’s a remarkable celebration of 50 years of this show, while at the same time clearing the decks for a bold move forward. That’s as it should be – any anniversary special should not be mired in nostalgia, but should be a joyous “to be continued,” reveling in the fact that the tale goes ever on.

This special certainly does that, but it also does two other important things miraculously well. I’ll have to get into some spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen The Day of the Doctor, skip to the end of this column.

So here are those two things, and why they’re important.

1. The special wraps the past seven seasons into one epic tale. It does this by finally addressing the Last Great Time War, the wound that has been at the heart of the series since its return in 2005. The Doctor we met in Rose was haunted by his actions in the war, and wracked with survivor’s guilt. And his two subsequent incarnations struggled with it, David Tennant’s 10th Doctor growing angrier and prouder, while Smith’s 11th tried to forget. In fact, Smith’s Doctor tried to erase himself from the universe entirely.

During Tennant’s time, we learned that the Doctor wiped out his home planet of Gallifrey, killing the Time Lords and the Daleks in one fell swoop. Of course, the Daleks survived, which only added to his sense of shame – it was all for nothing. At the end of last season, we met a forgotten incarnation of the Doctor, played by John Hurt. It was he who pushed the button, using a sentient weapon called The Moment to commit double genocide. And for that crime, the Doctor banished him from his own memory.

For a long time, The Day of the Doctor looks like it’s simply going to show us the Doctor’s moment with the Moment. But in a magical sequence that only this show could do, the Doctor visits his former self (twice, actually), and finds a way to rewrite his own narrative. It was the guilt over pushing the button that allowed him, over 400 years, to evolve into the man who could think his way around pushing the button, while preserving the timeline. The solution is elegant, and it brings the entire revived show full circle. The Doctor has healed himself. It’s absolutely beautiful.

2. It sublimely connects the old and new shows into one glorious whole. There has always been some debate over whether the revived series is a continuation or a reboot. Moffat has definitively answered this in the best way possible. He started with The Night of the Doctor, a seven-minute prequel that brought Paul McGann back to the role after 17 years. (I want a McGann miniseries. He was amazing.) But The Day of the Doctor outdid it, uniting the Doctor’s timeline from his earliest incarnation to now. All of his regenerations take part in the thrilling climax – even 12th Doctor Peter Capaldi, making his first appearance – and the special references the old show left and right.

Best of all, the wonderful ending brings back Tom Baker, playing a future incarnation revisiting an old face. I can’t tell you how emotional it was for me to see Baker back in Doctor Who, for the first time since 1980. It was a gift, and a lovely one. And in a splendid twist, Moffat worked in an older Doctor not as a nostalgia trip, but as a clear sign that the Doctor will live on, and he will be happy. That was incredible.

I haven’t even talked about what a superb double act Tennant and Smith made, or how well Hurt fit into the mythos, often speaking for grumpy fans of the old series. (“Timey what? Timey wimey?”) It was, in every way it could be, absolutely perfect. I have never been prouder to be a fan of this show, and it was such a treat to share this moment with so many people. I know Doctor Who fans all over the country now, and in fact in a few other countries too. This was such a great moment for all of us, uniting not just the eras of the show, but fans of all of those eras.

Fifty years is such an achievement, but the show isn’t resting. It’s constantly moving forward, and that’s what makes it special. We get Matt Smith’s final appearance as the Doctor at Christmas, and then Capaldi’s first episodes next year. The show’s about to renew itself again, about to set the stage for its next few years. There’s no reason it shouldn’t do that forever. I’m not even 40, and I’m certain this show will outlive me. There’s magic in that. It’s bigger than all of us.

Thank you, Steven Moffat, for penning a fitting celebration for a show unlike any other. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the joy this show has brought me since I was six years old. And thank you, Doctor Who, just for being what you are. Here’s to the next 50 years, and to the madman with a box.

All of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will. Where do you want to start?

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is far from the most original observation I’ve ever made, but recording a cover is like trying on someone else’s clothes.

Sometimes the fit is awkward and uncomfortable, and you can hardly move without tearing or tripping over something. But sometimes, it’s so perfect that you learn to strut inside those borrowed duds, to the point where even close friends don’t recognize you. You don’t look like you, or like the person who owns the clothes – you’re some strange, unrecognizable hybrid of the two.

That is, if you do it right. Covers can be fascinating, or they can be a complete waste of time. If you’re going through the motions, playing a slavishly faithful rendition without bringing anything of yourself to it, then you’re just filling the air. As a wise woman once said, ain’t nobody got time for that. If I’m going to buy a covers album, it’s because I want to hear something I can’t imagine. If it sounds just like I thought it would, I’m bound to be a bit disappointed.

Let’s take my favorite covers project of the last few years, Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back. I could never have guessed just how Gabriel covering Arcade Fire’s “My Body is a Cage” with a full orchestra would have sounded. It seems unfathomable, and yet, there it is, and it’s probably my favorite thing on this record. This year, Gabriel finally released the companion volume, And I’ll Scratch Yours, with the artists he covered each doing one of Gabriel’s tunes. It’s a similar delight – you think you know what Bon Iver would do with “Come Talk to Me,” for instance, or how the Magnetic Fields would recast “Not One of Us,” but hearing these renditions is revelatory.

Every year there’s a crop of covers records – some worth it, some not. But 2013 seemed to have more than the usual share. I have three very different ones to discuss this week, starting with the third volume of Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs’ Under the Covers series. Sweet is a power pop genius with a knack for self-harmonizing, while Hoffs made her name as one of the Bangles, and has a number of glistening pop records to her name. Every few years, the pair takes on a different decade’s hits and deep cuts. They celebrated the ‘60s in 2006, and the ‘70s in 2009, which means it’s time for the ‘80s.

But here’s the thing about Sweet and Hoffs (or Sid n Susie, as they call themselves in this context): they haven’t changed their sound since that first outing. So this is a group of ‘80s songs played by a band straight out of the ‘60s, with that Sweet-style analog production. That’s an interesting wrinkle, and it adds spice to this collection.

Even if you haven’t heard them together, you can almost imagine the way Sweet and Hoffs would harmonize, the lovely sounds their intertwining voices would make. And you’d be right – they sing together beautifully. But by the third volume of these covers, we’re used to that, so it’s the arrangements that make this record. Granted, they do choose songs that fit their template, but this is still one of the most organic ‘80s tributes I’ve heard.

Volume 3 kicks off with a dynamite version of R.E.M.’s “Sitting Still,” a clear indication that Sweet and Hoffs are not going to stick to the tried and true. It’s remarkably faithful, Sweet playing those ringing Byrds-ian guitar figures perfectly. Their note-perfect version of Dave Edmunds’ “Girls Talk” (written by the great Elvis Costello) rocks, as does their resurrection of “Big Brown Eyes” by the dBs. Who wouldn’t want to hear Hoffs sing “Kid” by the Pretenders, or hear Sweet crash his way through the delightful English Beat tune “Save It for Later”? In both cases, the pair pays homage to the original while bringing a new dimension to it.

Throughout this volume, Sweet and Hoffs pogo back and forth between well-known songs and forgotten classics. I’m not sure I ever needed to hear Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” again, even in a setting like this, but I very much appreciated Hoffs’ tribute to the Go-Go’s, revving up “Our Lips are Sealed.” And while there are certainly other Smiths songs they could have chosen, “How Soon is Now” remains wonderful. On the flip side, there’s Kristy MacColl’s delightful “They Don’t Know,” which Hoffs knocks out of the park, and the Bongos’ “The Bulrushes,” a song I’d never heard. They dig deep into the XTC catalog to find “Towers of London,” and close things out with Lindsey Buckingham’s great “Trouble,” here stripped of some of its eccentricity, but none of its elegance.

Is Under the Covers Vol. 3 successful, despite hewing pretty closely to the originals in most cases? I think so. It’s great fun to hear these two golden-throated singers weave their way around this material, smoothing out the more angular ones (like “Towers of London”). The song selection gives an interesting insight into both Sweet and Hoffs, and all told, it’s 50 minutes of pure pop delight. I can’t hardly wait until they get to the ‘90s – aside from Sweet’s own work, there wasn’t much melodic pop to be found, so I’m interested to hear what they choose. This series is a winner, as far as I’m concerned.

While Sweet and Hoffs do stick pretty closely to their source material, they’re definitely not trying to clone the original singers. That’s a trick that our other, much less likely pair pulls off on their out-of-nowhere covers record. I’ve been saying this out loud to people to see if they believe me – Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and Norah Jones have teamed up to faithfully cover an entire Everly Brothers album from 1958. Yes, this is a real thing you can really go buy right now.

They’ve titled it Foreverly, but really, it’s the Everlys’ Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, itself an album of traditional songs and covers. Jones and Armstrong have altered the order a bit, but changed little else – the sound is vintage, despite being fuller, with drums and harmonicas, and the harmonies remain as they always have. Jones takes Phil’s tenor parts, while Armstrong handles Don’s baritone lines. And it works – I was very surprised at how well their voices dance together. They don’t mess with the vocal arrangements at all – Jones doesn’t have to slip into falsetto on “Long Time Gone,” for instance, but the pair mimics the Everlys remarkably well.

The original album was rootsy and acoustic, but Foreverly adds some richer studio touches. “Lightning Express,” for instance, now sounds like a Jon Brion special, with shuffling drums and chimes, while “Rockin’ Alone (In an Old Rockin’ Chair)” is now a piano ballad. These arrangements, while certainly filling things out, remain respectful of the originals. Foreverly is sweet, and while Jones could do this stuff in her sleep, Armstrong is the unknown quality here, and he acquits himself well.

Still, Foreverly is a bit of a novelty, and as interesting as it is, I probably won’t pull it out too often. It’s a neat document of an unlikely pairing, and if it gets more people to listen to the Everly Brothers, great. But the original album isn’t a favorite, and this reinvention is nice and reverential, and that’s about it. It answers its central question – yes, Billie Joe Armstrong can sing this stuff, and can harmonize with Norah Jones well – within the first 30 seconds, and after that, it’s much less fascinating.

Luckily, our third covers album doesn’t fall into the same trap. It’s remarkable from start to finish, the finest of the trio on tap this week. It’s called Fellow Travelers, and it’s by Shearwater, the ambitious Texas band led by the amazing Jonathan Mieburg. The thrill of Fellow Travelers is that it sounds like a new Shearwater album – the band clearly put as much care into the song selection and arrangement of this thing as they do with each new studio effort. Plus, the song choices are generally obscure enough that they may as well be new Shearwater songs.

Case in point – the record opens with Jesca Hoop’s brief “Our Only Sun,” performed on piano and Mieburg’s soaring voice, before crashing into Xiu Xiu’s abrasive, propulsive “I Luv the Valley Oh!!” Shearwater smooths this song out – well, it couldn’t possibly be less smoothed-out than the original – and they drive it home with a pounding beat and huge guitars. Elsewhere they cover tunes by Wye Oak, Clinic and David Thomas Broughton, bringing something new to each one. It’s probably for the best, though, that these songs are all pretty obscure, since Shearwater is not a band that can disappear into a cover. Mieburg is too distinctive a singer for that.

Fellow Travelers is definitely not a catalog of the band’s influences. It’s more of a snapshot of songs by contemporaries. Mieburg sings the hell out of Broughton’s “Ambiguity,” transforming this haphazard folk ditty into a tiny epic, slowed down and graceful. The band also recasts Wye Oak’s “Mary is Mary” as a folksier number, half as long as the original, with a delicate electric piano, and they close things out with a gentle reading of the Baptist Generals’ “Fucked Up Life” that puts a sweeter bow on things than you’d expect.

Shearwater does drop some fascinating surprises. They cover Coldplay’s “Hurts Like Heaven,” stripping it of all the Mylo Xyloto excess and playing it straight, on pianos and ambient guitars. They take on St. Vincent’s “Cheerleader” with aplomb, playing it sloppy and joyous, and Mieburg doesn’t alter the lyrics one jot, to his credit. And in the most surprising turn, they deliver a convincing, raucous take on Folk Implosion’s ‘90s dance tune “Natural One.” The Shearwater version sounds a bit like Depeche Mode, but it keeps the original’s sense of menacing groove.

Fellow Travelers is what a covers record ought to be – it celebrates the original songs while asserting the band’s identity throughout. These tunes are all reinvented, to one degree or another, and they all end up sounding like Shearwater – so much so that the one original, “A Wake for the Minotaur,” fits right in. If I told you this was an album of new Shearwater songs, even the longtime fans would believe it. Mieburg and company have tried on these clothes, made some alterations, and found that they’re remarkably comfortable. They’ve made something special here, something that perfects and transcends the idea of covers albums. It’s still ineligible for my top 10 list, but it’s wonderful.

Next week, I say happy birthday to Doctor Who. Then, I bat cleanup on the year as we head into the home stretch. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m pretty sure this is all David Bowie’s fault.

Showbiz personas certainly existed before Bowie, but he’s the first worldwide rock star I can think of who brought drama school character-playing to popular music. Bowie wore costumes and face paint to play Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, among others, erecting a wall of artifice between himself and his audience. And he made it look cool. He infused his work with theatricality, rarely if ever playing himself, and his conceptual play-acting got under the skin of those who believe all art should be “authentic” and “real.”

I’m not even sure it’s possible to see true authenticity in art. We’re seeing whom the artist wants us to see at all times. Even the most naked and raw art I know is subject to that same filter – we can’t read an artist’s mind, or live an artist’s life. We can only experience what they want us to. Image-conscious myth-making has been part of pop music since the very beginning, with Elvis’ sneer, Mick Jagger’s pout and the Beatles’ moptops as much a part of their appeal as the music. (Hell, you can go back to Frank Sinatra’s suit and whiskey glass.) Bowie just kicked that up a few notches.

The advent of MTV made theatricality almost mandatory. Younger readers may not believe this, but there was a time when MTV aired music videos, almost exclusively. The best and most popular of them were the most dramatic, with costumes and characters. The ‘80s were a decade in which Bono was considered one of the most authentic rock stars in the world. Think about that. And even he decided to dress up and step outside himself in the ‘90s. U2’s “lost decade” was all about the notion of finding art within the artifice.

I think you can draw a straight line from Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga. All three use their natural theatricality to try to get at something real, and all three use their fame to comment on their audiences. But as the latest iteration of the costumed character pop star archetype, is Gaga actually saying much? She’s called her third album ARTPOP, all caps, as a mission statement – she believes she is melding artistry with popular culture like no one else. On the strength (or lack therof) of the album, I’d say she’s delusional. But she’s certainly trying.

ARTPOP is a blindingly ambitious mess that holds Gaga’s audience at arm’s length, promising insights but delivering shallow commentary on mass popularity. About half of it works, including the first four tracks, so for a while, it seems like Gaga has taken the next step forward after the validating Born This Way. This is certainly more of a deliberate pop record – the longest song is 4:29, and all 15 tracks are done in less than an hour. That seems a direct response to criticism that Born This Way was bloated and overstuffed, but it’s also in line with what she’s trying to do here – meld her artistic ambitions with our singles-driven culture.

Her best musical moments here come awfully close to pulling that off. On opener “Aura,” she works with Israeli EDM duo Infected Mushroom, and the result is dazzling. An Ennio Morricone intro gives way to some Middle Eastern shimmying on guitar, which then slams into a KMFDM-style industrial stomp, which in turn blossoms into a pure pop chorus. That’s all in the first two minutes. Gaga offers a convincing Euro-pop dancefloor strut on winners like “G.U.Y.” and “Sexxx Dreams,” and she resurrects her sweeping piano anthem side on “Gypsy.” None of these songs skimp on melody, and at their best, they’re as good as she thinks they are.

Too bad she has to sing over them. The lyrics on ARTPOP are generally insipid – shallow, banal, barely counting as commentary. “Do you want to see the girl who lives behind the aura,” she asks in the first song, but then never shows her to us. The character Gaga is playing here is obsessed with pop culture, and has nothing to say about it. I certainly hope she doesn’t think that devoting an entire (admittedly catchy) song to calling Donatella Versace a spoiled bitch counts as cogent commentary. We come out of ARTPOP knowing only that the Gaga character loves sex and attention – a line like “love me, love me, please retweet” could be seen as satire, but she delivers it straight. This is what she thinks a melding of art and pop is – glittering, head-spinning songs about fame culture.

That works up to a point, but when the songs falter, the album follows suit. After the swell opening quartet, Gaga shoehorns in “Jewels ‘n Drugs,” an uncharacteristically awful tune that seems to exist just to give Twista, Too Short and T.I. space to rap about nothing. “Do What U Want” is an interesting idea – it’s about separating sex from intimacy, and image manipulation from truly knowing someone. But the music is earthbound, and R. Kelly offers nothing except to rhyme Gaga’s “do what you want with my body” with “in the back of the club, doing shots, getting naughty.” “Dope” is the sensitive piano ballad this time, but it gets all Meat Loaf, and when she sings “I need you more than dope,” it’s hard to suppress the laugh reflex.

You can’t say Gaga isn’t trying to make this character work. But I’m wondering if it’s worth it. Even more than last time, Gaga is all artifice on ARTPOP. The album ends (somewhat awkwardly) with “Applause,” the first single, and it sums up the record – she’s all about the attention and validation. I’m pretty sure she’s satirizing people like Paris Hilton, but she feels lost inside this character, and it’s tough to find her on this album. She’s naked on the hideously designed front cover, but she’s airbrushed into something plastic, something inhuman. This is probably what she’s getting at, but she’s such a promising artist that making that point over and over again seems like a waste.

Here’s something I never thought I’d say – if you want to see a pop star who truly has grown, check out Eminem’s new record. The once and future Marshall Mathers made his name playing a particularly irresponsible character named Slim Shady, and his most famous works – the opening one-two of The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP – found him engineering a grand-scale social experiment as satire. Could the world love someone as violent, vicious and irredeemable as Shady? And as he got more and more depraved, would popular culture reject him, or would fans continue to idolize and emulate him?

As the years have passed, Mathers has answered his own question by rejecting Shady himself, and putting him away. His lyrical sleight-of-hand has not faded – he may be the most interesting rapper in the world for a grammar nut like me – but his concerns have matured. He backslid on 2009’s aptly titled Relapse, but on 2010’s Recovery, he sounded like a man reborn. No characters, no shock tactics, just Mathers rapping about becoming a better man and a better father. It was riveting, uplifting stuff.

Which is why I was initially wary of his new project, The Marshall Mathers LP 2. Why on earth would the Mathers that made Recovery want to pen a sequel to his least responsible album? Turns out, though, this is unlike any hip-hop sequel I’ve ever heard – it’s more of a full-length apology for the man he used to be. This is Mathers surveying his legacy, and shaking his head. It’s an album about where he is now, and how much he’s grown. And with all that, it’s still thrilling stuff.

The record opens with “Bad Guy,” a seven-minute psychodrama that throws down a gauntlet. It’s a sequel to the chilling “Stan,” in which a crazed Eminem fan kills himself and his girlfriend while emulating Slim Shady. The first half of “Bad Guy” finds Stan’s brother reenacting that fatal crash, only this time it’s a kidnapped and bound Marshall Mathers in the trunk. Stan’s brother Matthew gives Mathers a lecture on responsibility before crashing and killing them both, and then Mathers wakes up and spits out a dynamite rhyme about self-doubt and shame, taking himself to task for becoming everything he once hated.

Much of this album is about comeuppance. The one skit, “Parking Lot,” follows the heist from “Criminal” to its logical and bloody end. “Asshole” finds Mathers raking himself over the coals for filling that role for too long: “Women dishin’ but really thinkin’ that if anyone talks to my little girls like this I would kill him.” He acknowledges his own hypocrisy when dealing with the height of his success: “Fame made me a balloon ‘cause my ego inflated when I blew,” he raps on “The Monster.” And on “Evil Twin” he works to accept that Slim Shady is a part of him – in fact, that without him he wouldn’t be as good as he is – but works to control him.

The record’s most surprising moment is “Headlights,” the follow-up to “Cleanin’ Out My Closet.” The earlier song was a non-stop torrent of invective against his mother, but on this sequel, he admits that he cringes when he hears that song now, and spends five minutes praising his mother and telling her how much he loves her. It’s unlike any hip-hop song I’ve heard, and I’ll admit to being moved by it. This is real personal growth.

I don’t want to give the impression that Mathers has cleaned up his act. He still uses “faggot” as a pejorative, which is indefensible. He still includes “So Much Better,” an angry breakup song that goes too far into misogyny. (“I got 99 problems and a bitch ain’t one, she’s all 99, I need a machine gun…”) He still includes “Love Game,” a terrible piece of shit about “crazy” women. He still engages in oblivious hypocrisy, and still makes every crass joke that comes to mind. No amount of skill – and there are monumental amounts of skill on display here – can atone for that. Mathers has grown, but not enough.

But if you focus on how far he’s come, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is remarkable. “So Far” is a song about growing old, watching the rap game pass you by, and not caring. Check out “Rap God,” six minutes of the fastest tongue-twisting hip-hop boasting you’ll ever hear, full of respect for his betters and complete confidence. Listen to “Stronger Than I Was,” a mostly sung anthem of resilience. And then marvel at the fact that in every line, every groove of this record, Mathers is laying himself bare, warts and all, with the promise that he’s not finished working on himself.

I haven’t even mentioned the music itself. Rick Rubin’s at the helm, so there are many references to classic rock mixed in with the powerhouse beats – see “Rhyme or Reason,” which rewrites “Time of the Season” by the Zombies, or “So Far,” which makes liberal use of Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good.” The hooks are strong, including choruses sung by Rhianna and Nate Ruess of fun. Musically, it’s up to Mathers’ high standard, but the focus is on him. He’s a lyrical master, twisting syntax and even using syllable tenses in ways other rappers wouldn’t even dream of. Fourteen years after we first heard him, he’s still a thrill to listen to.

But most of all, he’s proof that emotional honesty trumps play-acting. With every beat of The Marshall Mathers LP 2, you get a real sense of Marshall Mathers the man, and while it’s not always a pretty picture, you can chart the journey he’s taken, and feel his desire to keep growing. The cover art of this album shows the same Detroit house from the original Marshall Mathers LP, all boarded up. But the album proves that Mathers is still very much alive and vital. It may be the most important album he’s made. It’s certainly the most real.

Next week, a pair of unlikely covers albums. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Sometimes records just stump me.

I’m not sure why that is. I am usually able to form at least a few coherent thoughts about anything I hear, and a cogent argument after about three listens. But occasionally I’ll run across one that completely befuddles my critical faculties. I’ll listen, and I’ll listen again, and I’ll keep listening, but I won’t be able to muster up any kind of response that makes sense. I get stuck on details, and I second-guess myself. And then I find it impossible to write.

I’m not sure any album has given me as much trouble as Arcade Fire’s new opus, Reflektor. Released to a ridiculous shower of hype, the Montreal band’s fourth long-player is a two-disc affair (despite only running 75 minutes), and a complete shift in style. It’s been alternately hailed as a masterpiece and derided as a bloated, ridiculous ode to pretention. And the thing that’s been tripping me up more than any other is this: both of those statements are true.

The first time I heard Reflektor, I couldn’t stand it. The album felt simultaneously overstuffed and threadbare, full of songs that stretched on far longer than they were worth. The band worked with James Murphy, the guiding light of LCD Soundsystem, and his influence is everywhere – this is the most danceable Arcade Fire album ever, but the beats, I felt after that first listen, weren’t supporting any great songs. And a few of those songs were disasters – enough of them, actually, that I initially called this the band’s Kid A. (Yes, I know, some of you like Kid A. I’ve never managed it, though.)

If I’d just stopped there, I would have panned the album – with some regret, since I adored their last one, The Suburbs – and been done with it. Of course, I also would have been wrong. For some reason, I kept listening. Well, I say that, but I know the reason. Arcade Fire is one of the most intriguing bands of the last 20 years, and even though Reflektor has all the hallmarks of a superstar album – the one ode to excess every internationally famous band gets to make – I kept on listening because I have faith that Win Butler and company wouldn’t release something that didn’t speak to them on some level. I kept listening not to find out if I liked the songs, but to find out why the band liked them.

I’m sure you see where this is going. Over repeated listens, Reflektor began to take shape for me. I could understand its contours better, and appreciate the smaller moments that bring it to life. But this growing familiarity with the record didn’t translate into full-on love. It’s still a difficult, meandering, overblown thing, and though the songs I initially disliked are the ones that now get stuck in my head most often (“Here Comes the Night Time” especially), I still don’t like them. Everything has changed, and nothing has.

As you can imagine, I’ve struggled with how to write about this record. I toyed with several gimmicks, including writing each paragraph as a reflection of the last, illustrating dichotomy. I got about halfway through writing one review that purported to be a dialogue between me and my reflection. Really. I did that. It was absolutely terrible. And the irony, of course, is that I was using a pretentious formal experiment to criticize a band infamous for its pretensions.

So I finally realized that the best thing to do is just come clean. I’m still not sure what to say about Reflektor, but I’ve come this far being honest, so I need to own up. This album has me conflicted like few others I’ve ever encountered. I’ve been an Arcade Fire fan for years – I avoided Funeral until the hype died down, but ended up liking it, and I enjoyed both follow-ups (the insistent Neon Bible and the first-album-again-but-better epic The Suburbs) more. Until now, they haven’t made an album that has confused me the way this one does.

Reflektor is certainly self-consciously epic. It’s deliberately split into two discs – a groove-driven first volume and a more (ahem) reflective second. Murphy’s presence is more deeply felt on the first, but given repeat listens, his stamp is definitely on the second as well. The six-member band has always trafficked in big, sweeping drama, and here, they’ve tried to preserve that while adding a loose-limbed danceability. Sometimes it works – the opening title track is a monster, gliding forward on a shimmying Talking Heads beat and some dazzling saxophones by Colin Stetson, and even though it outstays its welcome at 7:34, it’s the album’s most successful melding of the old and new styles.

“We Exist” is similarly effective, with its “Billie Jean” bassline and its relentless buildup. “Joan of Arc,” which closes the first disc, pulls off the transformation as well – the song starts off with a few seconds of wild punk abandon, before settling into a slamming groove. The synth bass on the choruses is unstoppable, probably the record’s greatest single element. The song doesn’t actually have anything to say about Joan of Arc, but that’s all right. It’s the catchiest thing here, particularly when Regine Chassagne sings Joan’s name in French (“Jeanne d’Arc, ah ooh”), as is the law in Canada.

The rest of the first disc, though, is a total mess. “Flashbulb Eyes” may be the stupidest song this band has ever recorded. The entirety of the lyrics: “What if the camera really do take your soul? Oh no. Hit me with your flashbulb eyes, you know I got nothing to hide.” The music sounds like an experiment gone wrong – the beat is disconnected from everything, the goofy synths distract, the faux-reggae lilt grates. It’s nothing compared with “Here Comes the Night Time,” the apex of the band’s flirtation with Haitian music. A terribly simple song stretched to six and a half minutes, this thing threatens to fall apart every few seconds, and the instrumentation never seems to gel.

And yet… and yet… I keep humming it. The sort-of chorus, on which Butler repeats the title phrase as the synths pump in and the chords keep changing, gets stuck in my head like little else since that “The Fox” song. “Night Time” is constantly shifting from one odd moment to another – it’s truly a mess – but it’s probably the most intriguing tune on Reflektor. It’s my dilemma in miniature. It doesn’t work – it never really comes close to working – but it’s compelling nonetheless, and I keep listening to it, hoping it will cohere, fairly certain it never will.

The pair of straight-up rockers that follow seem oddly incongruous here, and neither one offers much of an argument for its own existence. It’s true that the sloppy lead guitar line on “Normal Person” is the first moment since “We Exist” that really brings things home, but the song is just average by Arcade Fire standards. (“Do you like rock ‘n’ roll music? ‘Cause I don’t know if I do,” Butler mutters, adding a touch of irony to what is a fairly typical rock song.) I like the sentiment – “Never ever met a normal person” – but I am not sure what the song is trying to do. “You Already Know” fares better, with its skipping beat, jaunty acoustic guitars and infectious chorus, but it doesn’t seem to belong on this album.

Then again, this first disc is all over the place. The more sedate second volume is quite a bit more consistent, even if that consistency sometimes feels like sleepwalking. It opens with “Here Comes the Night Time II,” a synth-and-strings interlude that effectively sets a dreamy tone. The two songs that follow do nothing to dispel that – both “Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)” and “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus)” float a few inches off the ground, making up for a lack of melody with an abundance of atmosphere. (Orpheus and Eurydice are figures in Greek myth, a doomed couple who fail to escape the underworld together. Their statues adorn the cover of Reflektor, and their songs are thematically resonant.)

And admittedly, it takes guts to title a song “Awful Sound,” and sequence another called “It’s Never Over” partway through your double album. Some days this diptych works for me, and I find myself singing along with the Flaming Lips-ish chorus of the former, and the lovely refrains of the latter. But some days, I want both of these six-minute songs to do more than they do. The same goes for “Porno,” an uncharacteristically dark and crawling synthesizer piece. I’m alternately drawn in by its sinister feel, and bored by its refusal to do much of anything at all.

It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to call “Afterlife” the first real sign of life on the second disc, but it is the most vital-sounding, and (perhaps coincidentally) the one most resembling old-school Arcade Fire. It takes its dance-rock foundation and builds on it, and then keeps building – the propulsive “scream and shout until we work it out” chorus is a delight. It’s such a big moment that it’s almost a shame when the album sinks into the 11-minute “Supersymmetry,” a sleepy, oscillating ballad that concludes with five and a half minutes of backwards noise.

And that’s a perfect example of the bloat that infects this record. Still, the sprawl is part of the point of making something like Reflektor, an album only those bands with stunning amounts of worldwide fame are allowed to create. It’s clear the band thought they were making their Achtung Baby. They even tried on a different identity, calling themselves The Reflektors and wearing giant false heads, but they seemed uncomfortable with the pretense. If anything, Arcade Fire is too earnest, too convinced of their own greatness to truly commit to something that all-encompassing.

That’s why Reflektor fails, ultimately. It’s messy and disjointed when it should be confidently striding through new terrain. It stumbles over discoveries when it should be celebrating them. It’s possible that this is a transitional record masquerading as a grand statement. But without the next few steps in the band’s evolution, we can’t know where they’re headed. This is the work we have, and it’s much less than the sum of its parts. Reflektor is a series of interesting moments that never add up to very much, despite its reach.

But you know what? I’m still listening to it. It hasn’t turned me away yet. I’m still fascinated by the fact that this band made these songs, and put them in this order. Reflektor is one of the most compelling records of the year, even if it’s not one of the best. I’m still not sure what to make of it, or why it’s drawn me in so much. It’s a gigantic misfire with moments of greatness swirled in. I can’t fault anyone who loves it, or anyone who hates it.

Nearly 2,000 words, and I still don’t know what to say. I’ll keep listening.

Next week, art and artifice with Eminem and Lady Gaga. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.