Once in awhile it hits me that I’ve been writing this blog for a damn long time.
When ‘Dear John,’ the opening track of Aimee Mann’s excellent concept album The Forgotten Arm, came up as today’s random iTunes selection, I figured I’d featured the record, if not this song, before.
And sure enough, I did… five and a half years ago.
And even then, I’d been blogging for over a year. That was Song of the Day #489. Wow.
Even more surprising to me is that I reached Song of the Day #2,473 without featuring this album more than once. In fact, this record would be a perfect candidate for the two-week, every song treatment.
The Forgotten Arm is a lush, melancholy (yay!) album about a boxer with a drug problem and the woman who loves and hates him. It’s one of Mann’s most cohesive and affecting works.
On the midway that spring
When I saw you in the ring on the lawn
Dear John
Throwing kisses so Richmond’s unfortunates can go on
Oh, the lectures I gave
So the girls would behave
While the band played all your favorite songs
Dear John
Throwing kisses so Richmond’s unfortunates can go on
But numbers come up and you’re left to the fates
Though I always thought you were one of the greats
Once somebody stationed in Kuala Lumpur
Said he thought you went out, but he couldn’t be sure
And the midway I knew
Where the sky was so blue
With the memory of you is gone
Dear John
Meet Me In Montauk 
The good news is that, thirty years from now, should you start suffering dimentia, you will be able to do a search of your blog before mistakingly posting the same song twice as SOTD 12,579.
This is a perfect song for tonight’s big fight 🙂
And it’s amazing that you are still doing the blog and entertaining so many with your music choices!