For Adam

Live - Lightning Crashes [mp3]

Driving to the field yesterday, I hit a certain speed and was instantly transported, or teleported, or whatever, to 1994. Live's "Lightning Crashes" came on the radio, spare strums slowly filling, thickening, a hung head rising to sing of angels' eyes. A song so wonderfully earnest and overwrought and Alternative Rock that can only exist in an endless mid-nineties continuum. Listening to it swell and swirl to its tortured-heart end, I realized that this wasn't quite nostalgia: I'm not particularly fond of Live, or much of Alternative Rock, or even 1994 (that I can remember). It's just that this song at once typefies and transcends all those things, and listening now I can hear in it so much more than I ever gave it credit for: the sincerity, the patience, and the very rock n roll sense of the Power of Rock n Roll that it sends forth. Things I hear in the Bloc Partys and Sufjans and Hold Steadys that I wouldn't think to associate with a band like Live - which tells me I maybe haven't given 1994 enough credit (or maybe I'm crazy).

Visit Live online, and buy Throwing Copper here (from $1.00 - I guess I'm crazy).

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You Ain't No Picasso has some special M. Ward!