nostalgia for this song is so meta
don’t wanna tango with you, i’d rather tangle with him
1999-era Anger Pop is definitely due for a revival, or Gen A will never get to experience catchy breakup songs with casual murder threats in the chorus.
had a feeling i could be someone
It was 1988, and a 24-year-old Tracy Chapman – all of eight weeks into her major-label debut – had just wrapped up a short three-song set on a side stage at a huge Nelson Mandela tribute concert when disaster struck: Stevie Wonder, who was about to take the main stage, discovered that the floppy disk with his synth programming had disappeared!
(In retrospect, I didn’t need to say “it was 1988”. The fact that one paragraph has the words “Stevie Wonder”, “floppy disk”, “synth programming”, and “Nelson Mandela” might have given that away.)
Short one floppy disk and one Stevie Wonder, Chapman and her guitar are sent out to the main stage to play the beautifully melancholy Fast Car, while the stage crew rushes to address the seeming variety of technical difficulties, with the sound of mic checks occasionally drowning her out.
Needless to say, the audio engineering isn’t amazing, but the performance is notable because you can see a turning point in her career in real-time. She starts out the impromptu second set visibly nervous, and eventually breaks out in a grin at the realization that she has a packed stadium in the palm of her hand. Fun stuff.
burning up the candlelight
One day, someone will make the mistake of asking me “Hey, what was 2004 like?” And I’ll finally have the opportunity to make someone watch all three minutes and forty-four seconds of this video.
i wanna be the ones who walk in the sun
Ben Gibbard covers Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, in the style of… well, Ben Gibbard.
she’s got a broadsheet
The entire 2010-2015 revival of 80s power pop can be summed up in this 2022 track from The 1975. The jangly guitars! The harmonies! The synths! The melody that WILL NOT GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD. It’s hard not to love it.
can’t make an exception for a bad connection
2005 was a time to be alive. It was the peak of the hipster MP3 blog, and I was subscribed to roughly all of them.
Jonathan Coulton (who later went on to write the phenomenal end credit song from Portal) was releasing a Thing A Week, a new song composed and recorded every day. WFMU’s 365 Days Project unleashed some truly odd music on the world, including Mar-Tie the Avant Garde Grandpa’s Tribute to Beethoven. And NetNewWire, a wonderful RSS reader software I haven’t used in at least 15 years but still remember quite fondly, pushed all of them to my computer in real-time.
One of these blogs, it seems, was written by a serious Elliott Smith aficionado, who one day devoted an entire post to the detailed history of live performances of Elliott Smith’s Division Day. It highlighted his assorted live arrangements of the song over the years, speculated about ways in which the arrangements changed alongside his various life difficulties, and holding this bootleg up as the pinnacle:
I’m not qualified to comment on any of that, except to say that this is, in fact, an absolutely phenomenal performance.
At some point in the nearly two decades since then, I lost the MP3 and assumed it was gone forever – until I found that Archive.org, alongside their better-known archive of the entire Internet, also has an extensive collection of Elliott Smith bootlegs, including this particular show.
Which means I’m now blissfully reunited with (apparently) the all-time best performance of Division Day. Life is good.
(If you enjoyed it too, make a donation to your local suicide hotline in honor of Elliott, who died far too young.)
when you gonna earn that pay??
I was once sitting in a bar in Baltimore with my dad when a guy approached the house pianist (yes, house pianist, I don’t know, I live in a Billy Joel song) and asked if he’d play Imagine.
The pianist looked up with a look of equal parts confusion and despair. The guy dropped a $20 in the tip jar. The pianist smiled and proceeded to play Imagine as best as a bar pianist can at two in the afternoon, probably whilst imagining “all the people” tragically dying in a fire.
I think what I’m getting at here is, musicians and DJs who have to tolerate requests from the public put up with a lot of crap.
Which brings me to Train’s Play That Song, which went double platinum in 2017 and peaked at #41 on the Billboard Hot 100. So, presumably a lot of people have been requesting it at bars.
This song is a verbatim transcript of your drunk boomer uncle harassing the DJ at a wedding, but to the tune of that one riff from Heart and Soul.
That’s it. That’s… the whole song.
Somehow, despite this, the song has a strange staying power. You want to turn off the radio, but you just can’t. You have to listen to it the whole way through. The attraction of this song is something no one will ever be able to figure out.
Oh, no, wait, I got it. I just solved the mystery. It’s that the entire song is that one riff from Heart and Soul. Glad I could help.