"STOP TAKING YOUR CUE FROM THE PRESS RELEASE. YOU ARE BEING UNNECESSARILY MANIPULATED INTO POOR GRAMMATICAL CHOICES," the blogger who initially pointed this out wrote, pointing out that the album cover—which leaked in August—had, in fact, "NO MOTHERFUCKING COMMA."

Actually, no press release at any time had a comma on it. A steady stream of official press releases, official listening party invitations and official tour dates from TV On The Radio's label, Interscope, had arrived in writers' inboxes since July, but they were suspiciously comma-free, with the possible exception of the e-mails' BCC: fields. Seriously, how did this whole mess start?

Turns out it's yet another case of Pitchfork saying "jump" and everyone else saying "how high." According to the band's publicist, TVOTR management had initially claimed that the album's title would contain a comma, but eventually the band decided against adding the punctuation. A news item about the album—which said "the comma is indeed part of the title"—ran on Pitchfork in July; the first official press release announcing the album went out a week later, and the comma was gone, as it would be on every single press release, MySpace update, and official Web site transmission, as well as, eventually, the album art. There were no commas from the band, its management, or Interscope. But somehow everyone picked up the ball and ran with it, squealing "Yay! Talking points! Potential for hilarious parentheticals!" The New York Times gave our pugnacious punctuation the most shine, in a huge feature that demanded no less than three corrections about non-comma-related things. Even TVOTR's own Kyp Malone was confused by that point, telling Gothamist, "I don't know that there actually is a comma in the title. There may have been at some point in the construction of the art work on the cover."

Point being:
Dear Media, (the comma is intentional)
Stop repeating everything you read on Pitchfork. Seriously, you might accidentally convince people that Titus Andronicus is a good band.

P.S. Here are some extra commas we had lying around: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

... I've watched from the sidelines helplessly while EMI / Parlophone completely fucked the act I put two years into my life developing 'Siobhan Donaghy'.... when It was finally released I could have sold more records then they did out the back of my car at the markets...it was out on lime-wire 6 months before release and even though everyone wanted it, no one could get it, the physical release and digital releases were a week apart and a third of the CD boxes had the wrong CD in them.. some old jazz record from the 70's

All the time the 'UM and Argh' man was out at my studio in france talking about how great the album is and how huge it will be...... it turns out they were in secret talks with Terra Firma to jump ship and sell up.......

"Some old jazz record from the '70s"? Aieee. And he's right about the album leaking; I first posted about wanting Ghosts to come out over here back in April, and was promptly rewarded with a Rapidshare link from a reader; the album wasn't set to be released for a good two and a half months after that, at which time it debuted on the UK album charts at No. 92. And then it sank like a stone.

On the bright side, I'm sure that this story is thrilling Terra Firma, the company that now owns EMI; CEO Guy Hands recently said that his company was "just hoping EMI is as bad as [they] think it is" so that it could really, really right the label's ship—and even "care for every artist." Well, you know, they may want to start rooting out the problems in their packaging department first.

Lefsetz Letter [lefsetz.com]
Siobhan Donaghy - So You Say [YouTube]