Book of Matches

Case in point: The Plain White T’s.

Holy balls did we love that band back during the Stop and All That We Needed Era. I mean, we loved them. We saw them every time they came to town, sang out every word, played their songs on beat-up acoustics as the soundtrack to drunken nights…

And then 2008 came. Well, actually, “Hey Their Delilah” came a little before that. I’ll admit it, I liked the song… when it came out on All That We Needed in freaking 2005. But these ass-clowns - whether it was the band themselves or more than likely a label exec - decided to ride this song for the next 3 years. It came out as a single, an EP with some other crap, and was reissued as the last song on Every Second Counts, their 2006 full-length.

Enevitably this song came to define the band, and I just wasn’t down with this new incarnation of a band I once loved. They’ve released two albums since then that are poppy as all hell and of no interest to me. They’ve been back to town a few times and I haven’t cared to see them. Today I looked them up on Amazon for fun to see if they’ve put anything else out recently. The “Customers Who Liked This Also Bought This” section is a veritable cesspool of radio garbage, including the likes of Train, OneRepublic, The Script (by the way, is there a more perfect name for a formulaic radio crap-pop band than The Script? Just saying…), The Fray, and Lifehouse.

I guess that’s how things go sometimes, but still its hard for me to picture the band that I sweated to in rock-and-roll clubs, who wrote angsty anthems like “Stop” and “Penny”, in the same list as a band with a song titled “Drops of Jupiter.”

By the way, I think they made a wine named after that song… a Train wine. That’s radio rock these days, kids. Enjoy.