If it has anything to do with anything, I picked up a copy of Mercury Rev’s Deserter Songs the month it came out–August ‘98, I believe–but since I was slowly deserting my band at the time, I found it too hard to listen to. I couldn’t really get past the first song: “Bands / Those funny little plans / That never seem to work out right”. 1998 was just an all-around lousy year for me; I was a giant festering welt of unreleased change. Or something. A lot of the flat-out desperation from those end-times in Raleigh ended up in The Limitations of the Source Tape, naturally, but I’m not even sure if creative productivity is worth the funk I swam through there…
Still, in the middle of all this, there were bits of art that wriggled through my thick, resentful skull and let me know that good times (and maybe even good intentions) were at least Possible In The World at Large. And therefore by extension they might someday reside in yours truly. Examples of these shots-of-hope? Well, the film Shine did a lot of good for me, for example. So did Imperial Teen’s first album. And the wilfully whacky bits of Pavement’s Brighten the Corners, of course.
But perhaps the most shiny of all the culture-ushered silver linings was this Sloan song I got off a CMJ sampler I picked up…from someone…somewhere. “The Good in Everyone” was a song whose feel-goodiness couldn’t have scraped harder against what I was going through in ‘98. Barely two minutes of old-sounding happy-pop, a not-quite-Beatlesque rave-up with a two-chord verse and a harmony-rich chorus that slid all over itself in glorious repetition: “Ooh, the good in everyone / You see the good in everyone.” I went on to find other Sloan songs that could be described this way, but “The Good” was the first hit of Viagra for the soul, I’m telling you…
