Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Crowded House


View the NEW Premise & Ground Rules for Revisiting Vinyl.

What I Spun:  "Temple of Low Men" (LP) by Crowded House

Best Use for This Record: Explore it, it's worth exploring.

Filed Under: Post-Wave (Australian)

Would Go Well With: John Lennon, The Talking Heads, INXS, toad the wet sprocket

If You've Never Heard This Band, Start With:
Better Be Home Soon, Locked Out, Something So Strong

I remember when Better Be Home Soon came out.  I only heard it a few times, but I really liked it.  Those were the days before I became obsessive about learning who was singing any song that piqued my interest, so I just knew it as that simple acoustic thing resonated with something in me, sung by... somebody.  [shrugs.]  But soon, as is the nature of pop music, it lapsed out of airplay and thus faded from my memory like The One Ring from the thoughts of Middle Earth's inhabitants.  Eventually, I forgot this song had ever existed. 

I'm sure it must've popped up periodically on adult contemporary or flashback radio stations, but we failed to cross paths again for twenty years.  Until...

VH1 Classic is one of my favorite TV channels.  I was juiced when our cable provider finally added it.  It's still my go-to for background music when I'm in the living room.  And one day when I had it on, I heard the singular voice of an over-reverbed acoustic guitar that could have only existed in the late eighties or early nineties.  Ahhh.  "That's a sound that takes me back and just cradles me in a warm place," I thought.  Then the lyrics came in, and here was where the great power of music shown through.

Like I said, I had totally forgotten about this song; I literally hadn't heard it in two decades.  But by the end of that first verse, I knew exactly what it was.  And I was grinning because I knew what was coming next.  "And I know I"m riiiiiight for the first time in my liiiife!"  I belted it out along with the TV.  That secret, buried nugget that I would have sworn had vanished had only been lying dormant, waiting to take me back to something I had long thought forgotten.  Here was a new song for me to love with the added bonus of also being a song I already knew.

Armed with that joy, I always kept Crowded House on my radar when I started collecting vinyl, and have picked up a few of their records.  It turns out that they had several singles I had really relished singing along to when they came out -- I had just never known this was the band that made them.  So, old and new at the same time again.  It also turns out that they had a lot of really interesting album tracks that are new discoveries when I play one of their LPs.  So, new good stuff too (new to me anyway).  That combination is part of what makes spinning records so great.

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