You're Waiting for a Trainwreck

After I explained that whole "you don't play real emo!" fiasco to Rebecca, she said that, while this whole thing was pretty ridiculous, I should try to not make fun of anyone for a day. This is hard, because making fun of people is something that I'm pretty good at, but I will admit that I do it and can be too critical of people. While sometimes people are just unbelievably lame, like the people I looked at yesterday, it does help to just not do something that is inherently negative for a while.

To cleanse the IMU palate, I thought I would write about a song's specific meaning to me. I did something once before, talking about how "Chicago" by Big D and the Kids Table reminds me of a specific day one summer. This time I'm going to talk about "Motown Never Sounded So Good", one of favourite deep cuts from my favourite band, Less Than Jake.




This song always reminds a night in first year university. During the winter semester, a bunch of my friends and I took "Music and Popular Culture" together. The course had a three-hour lecture once a week on Thursday and was an absolute breeze, so we used the lecture to pre-drink before we went out later that night. By the time we got back to our residence at 10 PM, we would inevitably be pretty drunk.

During first year, I met and became best friends with Brian Link. A lot of this was based on us having similar, but still different taste in music. While our friendship was based on liking a few of the same bands, it grew a lot stronger when we started to introduce each to a ton of new bands, expanding our musical taste in the process. One of my first recommendations was, of course, Less Than Jake's Anthem. Upon getting into it, Brian's jam was "Motown Never Sounded So Good".

When you are becoming best friends with someone, I find there is always one moment where it hits you and you realize "Holy shit, this person is one of my best friends". Duff described an instance of this to me while he was living with our friend Justin. While he was leaving for school, Duff saw Justin waking up and said "'Sup stupid?", realizing "This guy is the fucking best." in the process.

There is too many quotation marks in that paragraph.

This happened to me after a Music and Pop Culture lecture. Both of us were rocking a pretty solid buzz and Brian did something like spill part of a Jagermeister shot on me, or something equally as inconsequential. I feigned outrage and Brian momentarily thought that I was actually mad at him. I dropped it, smiled and said something like "Nah, it's fine man." and a wave of relief washed over Brian's face.

This all coincided with the above song starting. Once it did, Brian, drunk as a skunk, raised both of his arms in the air and mimed the "And so you say, that all your white flags are up" line with an extremely serious expression on his face.

That was when I realized that Brian was one of my best friends.

As of result of this memory, this song represents something a lot bigger to me than just being a catchy song on the first album I bought from my favourite band. It represents budding friendship. It tells me that you can find people who will mean something huge to you at any point in your life and that you will have things in common with these people that you never would have expected. As corny as it sounds, that's something that I will never stop believing in.

Best Thing I Got For My Birthday

Today I listened to Make Your Mark by Living With Lions on the way to and from work and I was really struck by how amazing that album is, as I hadn't given it a full listen in quite a while.




I was headbanging and jumping up and down pretty hard on my skateboard while singing along the whole ride and thought to myself "You know what? Fuck it, this is one of the best Canadian punk releases of all-time." I feel like this band really flies under the radar in the punk scene for no reason that I can think of. To put it as simply as I can: They write fast, catchy, poppy punk songs with great guitar lines and are real, real good at it.

I heard both "She's A Hack" and "A Bottle Of Charades" and just couldn't wait to see them live. I eventually saw that they would be playing in Guelph and that was up there as the most excited I've been to see a show. They killed it, I picked up Make Your Mark at the show and didn't stop listening to it for a while and the night is one of those ones that has a habit of sticking out in your mind. Still one of my favourites.

They're putting out a new album this year. While I haven't been as keen on what they've put out since Make Your Mark, I'll still eagerly check it out.

Also, the new Superchunk album is streaming and one of the songs makes reference to the Skatalites' piano player. This guy is stoked.