Tag Archives: Kids in Philly

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Song of the Day #862: ‘Point Breeze’ – Marah

Back in April, I posted a song by Marah titled ‘Barstool Boys.’ I used them to illustrate how sometimes expectations get in the way of your enjoyment of an album, a film, whatever.

In Marah’s case, the band came highly recommended by author Nick Hornby but initially failed to live up to his hype. Around the time of that post, however, I’d rediscovered their music (through the album Kids in Philly) and was starting to understand all the praise.

Well, since then I’ve jumped fully on the Marah bandwagon. I haven’t gotten any more of their albums (yet) but I definitely plan to. Kids in Philly, though, has emerged as one of the best records I’ve heard in recent years.

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Song of the Day #639: ‘Barstool Boys’ – Marah

Wholehearted recommendations are a funny thing. Yesterday I wrote about the anonymous man who steered me toward track three of a Tom Petty album. Today I’ll talk about a recommendation by a person I’ve never met but whose opinion I value greatly.

Nick Hornby, author of the best book about music and fandom I’ve ever read (High Fidelity) and one of my very favorite writers of any sort, released a few years ago a collection of columns he’d written for literary magazine The Believer. The column is about books (each month he lists the books he bought and the books he read the previous month, with the lists seldom overlapping) but, as he is Nick Hornby, he writes a lot about music as well.

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