The band reunion I’d most like to see — more than Talking Heads, Ben Folds Five, Led Zeppelin or Simon and Garfunkel — is The Smiths. It’s so tantalizingly close to happening — all the members are alive and well and active in the music industry — yet it likely never will. Morrissey and Johnny Marr hate each other like poison and they reportedly turned down $5 million dollars to reunite for a single song at a recent festival.

It just seems wrong that a band so influential and creative should have lit up and flamed out over the course of only five years in the mid-80s. By now The Smiths could have been as big as U2, with as many albums under their belts. Sure, Morrissey has released a series of fine solo albums, but his work apart from Marr has never been quite up to the level of the stuff The Smiths put out.

This week I’ll feature a handful of those songs by one of my favorite bands.

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