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December 24, 2007
albums you should own: matthew sweet/girlfriend
i don't know where you found yourself or what you were listening to in the summer of 1991. i was living in with my dad's family in new bern, north carolina - and i was listening to a lot of pop metal. and life was good. and then one day i woke up - turned on the mtv and suddenly everything changed. because the most revered and critically acclaimed one hit wonder of all time (nirvana for all the lay people in the audience) changed the landscape of what was popular. and i'm here to tell you i wasn't all that happy about it. it's true that pop metal had run its course and bands like bon jovi and def leppard were on their last legs - but still....although smells like teen spirit was a catchy little number there was never any danger that it was going to change the course of my existence. anyway, mtv figured out pretty quickly that the kids were going nuts for this formerly under the radar stuff and as such you suddenly saw a lot of videos popping up from bands you had barely - or never even heard of.
and that's how i first stumbled upon matthew sweet. the video for his song girlfriend was played fairly frequently probably because it was mostly anime and - therefore - it was considered groundbreaking at the time. it didn't hurt that it was a catchy little number. i know i liked it quite a bit. at the time i was basically an 18 year old shut-in because i had no job and no transportation so i wasn't buying a lot of music. i spent most of my days learning journey songs on the piano....until 3:30 would roll around - when my 8 year old brother kevin would come home from school. then we played basketball until the sun went down. that being said - if you don't think i could totally rock don't stop believing you would be sadly mistaken. because i totally did. brices creek road was never the same. and somewhere in the midst of my journey obsession i forgot all about girlfriend.
a couple of years later after i moved back to florida and started cleaning windows professionally - probably around '93 - i scratched together some cash and bought my first compact disc player. it was a little sony boombox i purchased at the target at the mall across the street from st. andrews presbyterian church p.c.a. - you know, the mall where adam walsh was kidnapped back in 1980...? anyway, it was pretty sweet - but at the time i didn't own any cd's so i went up to this little used cd place near the house in north miami beach and it was there that i found a used copy of matthew sweet's girlfriend album (it should be noted that i was still listening to alot of bad latter day def leppard at the time - adrenalize was not their finest hour)
and it changed my life. and what i mean by that is it changed the way i thought about music. i often tell people that this was the singular (cingular?) album that made me want to play guitar. i had no idea at the time who richard lloyd and robert quine were but i knew they were rocking my face off. and matthew sweet - wow. i don't know if there has been a better power pop song writer in the history of humankind. although now that i think about it a.c. newman is pretty rad as well.
not only is girlfriend a great powerpop record - it might also be the greatest breakup record of all-time. and the photo of tuesday weld on the cover...yikes!!! i was/am in love. i learned later on that our friend matthew was going through a divorce at the time the record was written and recorded and what this meant for me was that every song - especially songs like day for night - thought i knew you - and you don't love me - were right in my lori pinder obsessed wheelhouse. which reminds me - that good will hunting kid was full of shit. just because you completely alter the course of your life to go see about a girl - it doesn't mean she'll want to see you.
but i digress - i'm proud to say i still own the same copy of girlfriend that i bought back in the day - and even though i'm much less angsty than i used to be i'll still take it on road trips and crank it up. and when i do it takes me back to the salad days of young christopher - tawny and tan in his floridian paradise...playing beach volleyball in his spare time - which was pretty much all the time and life was good...and...where was i? oh yes, i would definitely say this was the first album that set me on a course to explore new music that was sort of off the beaten path. mr. sweet's follow up album altered beast is equally fantastic and it contains one of the greatest/darkest love songs ever recorded - someone to pull the trigger . it's certainly the best song matthew sweet has ever written. so - if someday you find yourself in a record store with some spare coin in your pocket pick up a copy of girlfriend. i'd love to know what you think. i know that i could easily burn a copy of it for you - but this is called album's you should own - not albums i'd like to burn for you.
| By young_christopher | 12:29 AM
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Posted by: Micah at December 26, 2007 12:45 AM
Posted by: heidi at December 28, 2007 9:24 AM
Posted by: Nick at January 10, 2008 4:18 PM