Because it can still happen. I can still hear a song on the second day (it’s usually the second day, for me) and end up sitting here at my desk, scheming on a plan to get this song’s album into my sweaty little palms.
What’s even better is that it’s Teenage Fanclub, with whom I already have a history. A Catholic Education is surely in my Top Ten Albums from My College Days Generally, and I fell in love to/with the bittersweet strains of Bandwagonesque. In fact, I saw Fanclub on that tour while studying in England, alone and drunk for perhaps the third time in my life. Once again in fact, they outro’d “Satan” with the intro to “Teen Spirit.” And the whole room hopped in time.
Come to think of it, it gets deeper than that. Perhaps on the second time I was drunk in my life, I was also alone (this sounds terrible, I know, but that’s Studying Abroad for you), wandering across a cricket pitch at night (no kidding)–and I was either listening to or merely thinking about the instrumental that closes Bandwagonesque, “Is This Music?”, and I literally came to tears thinking about how beautiful it was, and how sad it was that I would one day die, that people would go on making new music as gorgeous as this, and I wouldn’t be able to hear it…
But what’s truly great about re-discovering these guys (and that’s what’s going to happen, by the way–I can feel all the Chicagoland record stores’ foot-thick magnets pulling me, each labeled Songs from Northern Britain) is that back then the greatest Fanclub song (and everyone agrees on this, just ask them) was “Alcoholiday,” and its opening decalartion dressed my young, commitment-phobic ass in sickly-sweet self-absorbed glory: “There are things I want to do / But I don’t know if they will be with you.” Ahh, yes.
In fact, I was going to write a “perfect song” about “Alcoholiday,” but it’s hard to champion a song whose basic pessimism no longer truly speaks to you. What “Ain’t That Enough” highlights for me, though, is the sweet end of the bittersweet in “Alcoholiday.” It’s not like the guy declares outright that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life with this girl; he just says he’s Not Sure. Unresloved–just like yours truly back in ‘92.
Well, consider “Ain’t That Enough” the resolution. The sunlight of this song is undeniable, and it’s something you ought to hear for yourself. “Here is a sunrise / Ain’t that enough?” It sounds like Lindsey Buckingham is back there singing, like on “Hold Me.” Meets the Byrds. Meets “He’d Be a Diamond” by the Bevis Frond. And it’s not like the Fanclub were never this sweet. They’ve always been about the Happy, musically. Only now (now? this song’s 7 years old, but whatever) they’ve grown up, and they’ve dropped the fashionably cynical pose, and maybe they have something to focus that Happy on, the kind of thing that I have with Amy, maybe. Because it’s not really about Being Sure, anyway. It’s about Having Faith, especially in the idea that what you have actually is enough. And the big irony is that once you see it that way, then everything becomes Way More Than Enough, overflowing like a brook, or purple prose, or the chorus to a perfect song.
