Song of the Moment: Mistakes We Knew We Were Making

Pretty much anyone who knows me knows that I was an obsessed fan of Brand New when Deja Entendu, their second album, came out. All sorts of headlines on the lines of 'emo grows up,' and I bought the CD on a pure whim, and fell in love with it instantly.

But the best thing about obsession is that it leads to hyperlinks; you discover all sorts of new stuff because your obsession loves them, or is linked to them in some way. From the former, I have inherited a great love of Raymond Carver and The Smiths, and from the latter?  Straylight Run.

I could go into the endless gossip of who slept with who's sister or girlfriend or wife or mother in Taking Back Sunday, but that would diminish the most important fact: Taking Back Sunday sucked in comparison, Brand New were awesome, and Straylight Run had a couple of FANTASTIC songs.

Oddly enough, Straylight Run's best songs were the ones on their tentative floater EP before they released their first full length. But there is one song, one that comes to mind everytime I think of anything I regret or might regret in the future.

I got into emo (we can define what I consider emo another time) like Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World because I was an angsty teenager, not because I particular related to their visions of obsessed loss. But Straylight Run has this one song, the song that actually pops into my head from time to time because it's so bloody relevant. This happens with Brand New as well, but it seems to happen more when I'm generally feeling a bit lost, rather than during specific moments.

So here we go, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making.

"So we bottled and shelved all our regrets,
Let them ferment, then came back to our senses.
Drove back home, slept a few days,
Woke up and laughed at how stupid we used to be."

Ah, the words to get through moments of poor decision-making. I've had more than a few in the recent past. I bet you have too.

The MP3:
Straylight Run - Mistakes We Knew We Were Making

Read More

Band Rediscovery: The Replacements

It's an absolute miracle that I hadn't gotten into the Replacements before now. Back in college, I was a huge Vagrant records kid, and probably listened to every band about a thousand times. Except for Paul Westerberg (lead singer of the Replacements), that mysterious old guy on the label who wasn't doing shoulder-sleeve emo or hardcore lite. I knew a few of his songs, and I knew a lot of obsessed Replacements fans, and I knew that crazy video that's always in top ten lists where all you see is a speaker pulsating.

But then I saw Adventureland, with its superb late 80s indie soundtrack. I tracked down pretty much every song in the movie, and a LOT of them are by the Replacements. Classic jangly guitar rock of the best kind, celebrating youth and nihilism and all the things we get nostalgic about. Keep in mind that this was around the time that alternative music was just getting started, punk was over, the radio was deluged with overproduced crap (and HAIR METAL!) So I imagine the Replacements were a breath of fresh air to kids looking for something else, anything else.

The band themselves self-destructed in a pretty spectacular fashion. Never able to let go of their anarchist roots, they decided that in every tv performance or industry show they would get hammered and sabotage their own careers. There are hilarious videos out there (track down the SNL performance for an absolute doozy of drunken lyrical fumbling. They are one of very few acts that were actually BANNED from SNL, that paragon of good taste).

Here are two of my favorite songs by them:
Can't Hardly Wait - from 1987's Pleased to Meet Me
Bastards of Young - From 1985's Tim


Also, here's the original demo of Can't Hardly Wait, which I actually think is better than the final album release (even though some of the vocals are a bit rough, but you can really hear their punk roots in this version):

Read More

Songs that Never Fail to Puddle Me: "I'm On Fire"

Like most people today, I have a healthy amount of disdain for Bruce Springsteen's 80s output (apart from Dancing in the Dark, which I've loved since I was a kid).

So while I made an effort to listen to his 70's music, and to a lesser extent his 90's music, I never heard this gem, one of the trillion hit singles from Born In the USA.

In fact, the first time I heard it was when Tori Amos covered it, beautifully and hauntingly, and I just thought, my god that's one HELL of a song. It went straight through me, especially the piano solo.



Somehow the original version of the song is even moodier than Tori's version, despite having 80s synthesizers and guitar effects. Everytime I hear it I start shaking and have to stop doing whatever I'm doing, or risk some sort of horrific accident.

Now I haven't bothered to research Bruce's 'original intent', but there is a school of thought that believes this song is from the perspective of a pedophile, lying in bed and thinking of what he can't have. I think that's too literal though. But I'll leave it to you folks to argue it out.

MP3: Bruce Springsteen - I'm On Fire

Read More