Natalie Merchant: “Carnival”

Forget how ubiquitous this sort of bongo-heavy overproduced convertible-rock used to be at your own peril; this sort of song was absolutely everywhere back in the day and the fact that you aren’t immediately agreeing with me is a factor of how wonderful our memories are at cherry-picking. The clutch thing about Natalie “Plus 9,999 Other Maniacs, I Guess” Merchant was how easily it fit her; you could tell Jakob Dylan always wanted to do a bump and kick over a Sovtek fullstack instead of riding a bass groove and speak-singing about car problems, but Natalie Merchant definitely owns an entire cupboard full of different types of tea and definitely knows all about how to use interlibrary loan.

And I’m not even really being fair because this song is alright. This song plus “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone” and “One Of Us” and “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” and “Roll To Me” was total fucking overload and no wonder we yanked the radio volume way up as soon as we heard a DoD grunge, but by itself it’s making me feel less stressed out and now I want a collection of Gogol short stories and a coffee that costs six dollars and a nap. Not that correlation is causation but you know what I mean.

Either way, I know this one thing: There certainly were a lot of songs in 1995 about hating your parents, your authority figures (e.g. the math teacher), and most of all, yourself — but there weren’t that many songs about straight up liking someone, at least not undraped with histrionics. So when you thought about a nice girl with twinkly eyes and the jitters started to float up in your stomach you might well have thought about this song as accompaniment, especially if she was into team sports and not Manic Panic and therefore uneligible for a mixtape leading off with Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bodies.” Therefore I guess I’m making the completely insubstantiatable claim that this song means more to you than you yourself remember. How’s that for some Wednesday sass.