Today's song is...
New York City
It's always struck me as funny that TMBG's only indisputable love song is a cover and not something they probably would have ever come close to writing and yet it's so perfect for them and beloved by so many fans. When I am rounding up my favorite TMBG songs, I think I always discount this one because it is a cover and that seems to disqualify it somehow. But when it comes right down to it, I think this is pretty high on my list. There are a lot of aspects of the recording I really enjoy. The bells, the bass part, especially in the early sections, a lot of the drums, and the guitar, particularly at the end. But I think I also have a sentimental attachment to it. As silly as it sounds, I apply a sort of personal interpretation to it where it becomes not a love song for a particular person but for the band and the fandom in general. New York City is now a place I associate pretty heavily with TMBG and almost all the times I've been there in the last five years have been to see them. And there is something kind of romanticized about New York that makes being there for a show kind of extra shiny. Not explaining it very well, but let's just leave it that I really enjoy this song.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Aw. I love this song. I have so many distinct memories. It was the closer at my first TMBG show, somewhere in my second TMBG show (which just made me smile), and that one awkward moment when the audience stood up at the third. And I really love that it's this romantic view of the city and its sights; certainly it's a concept of NY I've experienced in my life.
ReplyDeleteOdd as it may seem, this song is one of a pair for me, the partner of which is Boat Of Car. (I wrote about this back in SOTD #9.) They are linked in my mind because of Gigantic. If you haven't seen it, or if you've forgotten, there is an accelerating flurry of footage near the end of the movie from various NYC appearances in support of Mink Car on September 10th, 2001, culminating in a downtown midnight in-store where the Johns play New York City. It was a singularly devastating moment for me, hearing this almost naive song of love for a special someone, and of love for a special place, a place that would turn into Hell in less than half a day. I just watched it again tonight, and I still can't stop myself from thinking about which smiling faces in the crowd would soon find their lives turned inside out, or ended.
ReplyDeleteBoat Of Car, the other song from that in-store footage (in the bonus clips) that had special meaning for me, is different. While there was that same swirl of background horror in my experience of it, Boat Of Car has such an emotional distance to it that it never became one with those emotions for me. (It instead came to symbolize my discovery of the band's staggering songwriting range.) New York City, on the other hand, is a study in utter emotional accessibility, which I think is what made it so easy for that song to become my symbol of all those emotions running through me. New York City became about my experience of that moment in the documentary; about my guilt to this day about being a man with a wife, and a ten month old son, and feeling so lucky that they and I were nowhere near there (we were on vacation in Maine), while almost everyone else I knew and loved was in NJ/NY; and about my hatred of that city while still finding myself in awe of it, and hating my hatred of it when it was hurt, and knowing that part of me will ALWAYS love that city, and how that part of me hasn't stopped hurting for almost ten years now, and probably never will. This is my 9/11 song, and it is a beautiful song of the innocence of love, a timeless force that has survived every devastation the world has ever suffered.
John, that scene in Gigantic moves me to tears nearly every time I watch it.
ReplyDeleteI love this song, and I love hearing it live, especially at New York-area shows. I always smile when I'm driving around in winter and it comes up on shuffle, just for the "it's snowing, it's snowing, god I hate this weather" part.