Bad Books, simply put, is Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra. A true accident if there ever was one; Bad Books was never an intended nor calculated side project of Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull. Though the two musicians have collaborated and performed together on tour and within the Favorite Gentlemen community of artists for years now, the genesis of Bad Books came from a simple idea to fill space and time off the road by collaborating on a small batch of songs together at the top of the year. With no agenda and no expectations, what was birthed just one week later was Bad Books, a fully realized album encompassing five compositions each from both Devine and Hull, with the members of Manchester Orchestra filling out the sound and the band. The self-titled debut will be released October 19th, 2010 via Favorite Gentlemen Recordings, the record label that was founded and has been run by Manchester Orchestra since 2007. As songwriters go, Hull and Devine could not be further apart in terms of creative approach. The methodical wordsmith Devine, an English major from Fordham, is known to pine away for great lengths of time just to accurately pin-point one word within a lyric. “I was doing a take of ‘You’re A Mirror I Cannot Avoid’ and stopped myself for fifteen minutes because I was having trouble justifying ending two lines in the same chorus with the word ‘back.’ Just sitting there, staring at the screen, writing different word choices. I a...