Today's song is...
Why Does The Sun Shine?
This is one of the very few TMBG songs it turned out I was already familiar with when I got into the band. I just didn't know it was them. Or rather, I didn't know they had recorded it, as I has heard it sung at the summer camp I worked at, so there is really know way of knowing if it arrived in the camp song book via TMBG or straight from the original Space Songs record.
For a long time, even after I was seriously into the band, the only version of this song I had ever heard was the live "rock" recording on the Dial-A-Song anthology. I was actually kind of shocked when I finally heard the slow version. It was just so not what I was used to.
Like a few other songs that have turned up in Song of the Day over the past eight months, I can not even contemplate this song without thinking about it live. I've seen so many different crazy, insane versions of it that the recording just can't compare. One of the things that amused me on the '09 tour was that as soon as they released a studio version of the "rock" rendition on Here Comes Science, they started playing the slow version again live. But slow, fast, I think I've heard this song every way but backwards. Pirate style, Irish accents, Garrison Keillor, Ernie Boch, and of course my personal favorite, Katharine Hepburn. I've heard everything, I believe, INCLUDING the kitchen sink listed as an element that causes the nuclear reactions on the sun. The truly ridiculous things they do with this song never cease to amaze me and it is things like that this that keep me going back to shows over and over.
And this song is also the cause of one of my all time favorite pieces of stage banter from the Stone Pony. "Pirate style? I better get out there. I play on this one!" I think you had to be there but I still laugh at that every time I listen to the recording.
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Oooh, it's a pre-fandom song for me too! This was one of the three(!) TMBG songs arranged for the a cappella group I was in at Oberlin in the early '90s. I'd say that's why it'll always have a special place in my heart, but the other songs we did were Kiss Me Son Of God and She's An Angel, and I don't really care for either of those. But this one I like a lot (I'm currently one of two lonely votes for it over Purple Toupee)! And we'd do it in either a rock version or a slow "oom-pah" version, depending on its place in the setlist and our moods. Pirate-style never occurred to us, but I guess that's why they're TMBG and we were just an a cappella group.
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