How do you follow up on perfection? If you're The La's, you don't. The Liverpool band released one album, considered by many a pop masterpiece, and then vanished. Their songwriter, Lee Mavers was a perfectionist who believed his music never matched his expectations. Rather than settle, he chose to be silent.

Perfection and the costs of pursuing it with manic passion is the gist of an excellent feature story on the La's in this week's Entertainment Weekly. If you're not an EW subscriber, I recommend purchasing the magazine for this story (unfortunately it's not on the EW site as of yet). It's a great read. It inspired me to listen to the La's album again. I was surprised at how well it has aged and if it was released today, it would be my album of the year.

No story about the La's can ignore the song "There She Goes" and its place in pop culture. There must be a law that the song must be on the soundtrack of all teen romantic comedies. It's been endlessly covered (and butchered, if you ask me). Yet it's still truly a perfect pop track. It's the closest any band has come to writing a Beatles song the Beatles would actually have written.

The story should not end at "There She Goes". The eleven other songs on the album, while not as undeniably brilliant as that ubiquitous tune, are each concisely classic. Mavers's perfectionism certainly purified the album of any waste. Only "Looking Glass", the mournful closing track, exceeds three minutes. Rather than stuffing the songs with every idea imaginable, the La's give us one small set of stories. Despite Mavers's negative opinion of the results (he claimed to hate the album), this is a fable worth retelling.