Tag Archives: Especially For You

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Song of the Day #6,296: ‘Behind the Wall of Sleep’ – The Smithereens

Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1986…

#8 – Especially For You – The Smithereens

I didn’t hear The Smithereens’ debut studio album until several years later when the band played a free concert during my freshman year at the University of Florida. I liked what I heard at that show so much I picked up this CD the next day.

Especially For You is an alternative pop rock masterpiece, featuring one absolute banger after another. Lead singer/songwriter Pat DiNizio called the album “a greatest hits collection from a band nobody’s heard of” because they’d been writing and playing for five years before recording the album.

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Song of the Day #5,987: ‘Strangers When We Meet’ – The Smithereens

I recently had an idea for a theme week that was inspired by a quote from the 1977 film Star Wars.

In the movie, Luke Skywalker’s friend Ben Kenobi, a hermit living among the sand dunes on the desert planet of Tatooine, is told by Luke about a message he came across that mentions the name “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Upon hearing the reference, Ben says this:

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Song of the Day #2,174: ‘I Don’t Want to Lose You’ – The Smithereens

smithereens_especiallyI’m envisioning a future project — a list of bands that produced one excellent album but nothing else that crossed my radar.

This is different from a one-hit wonder because the whole album, not just a single song, has to be great. And it can’t be a group that has a few pretty good albums and one amazing one. This one album has to be the only work of theirs you own.

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Song of the Day #753: ‘In a Lonely Place’ – The Smithereens

I look at a mixtape as a kind of movie without pictures. It should ebb and flow the way a movie does, with the talky parts balanced by the action. And like a great movie, it should contain two or three strong, memorable sequences around which the rest revolves.

Sometimes a mixtape (or a movie) is born from the desire to create just such a sequence. You fall in love with the alchemy between a series of songs, decide they’d be perfect about three quarters of the way through Side B, then seek out filler to occupy the rest of the space. That might not be the ideal way to create your masterpiece, but it happens that way quite a lot.

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Song of the Day #29: ‘Crazy Mixed-Up Kid’ – The Smithereens

It’s funny to have a bunch of memories tied up in the only CD I own by a band I know just about nothing about, but that’s the case with The Smithereens’ Especially For You.

Flash back to my freshman year at the University of Florida, where I’m sharing a dorm room with a real asshole of a frat-guy cliche. We failed to click right from the start and fortunately he got an apartment a couple weeks into the semester and I wound up having the room to myself.

But once I was playing Elvis Costello and he told me Costello’s voice sounded a lot like the guy from The Smithereens, a favorite band of his. He played me a song and damned if he wasn’t right. Our one bonding moment.

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