Saturday update: There’s the Re-Listening project, but nothing else to report. After work I went to the house and sat down. And then I had dinner. Then I did the dishes. Then I fell asleep and slept for about 12 hours. So this’ll just have to do for Friday.
Sometimes I have been guessing when I picked up a CD. Sometimes I have a specific memory of that, when, how it came to be. I suppose it’ll continue to be like that as we go forward in the Re-Listening project. Paradoxically, there might be more guessing the farther along that we get. (I’ll blame the web for that in due time.) Today, we’re doing a bit of both. There’s something distinctly remembered here … and … yet …
“All For You” was released in January 1997 and I picked up Sister Hazel’s “… Somewhere More Familiar” soon after, when it was released the next month. It’s a happy, jangly pop record. The record went platinum in the U.S., peaking at 47 on the charts. “All for You” is the single you couldn’t avoid that year, and it made it #11 on Billboard’s charts.
I remember driving up U.S. 280 in the early hours of one morning playing and re-playing this track, learning the words to this song.
I remember I stopped at a Chevron for a bathroom break, looked at the newspaper box — remember those? and saw a stunning Birmingham News headline. But, and I’m looking at a quarter-century-old archives to verify this, the rest of that little anecdote is a false memory. The timelines don’t match up. So much for that story.
Anyway, “Happy” was a late-breaking single.
I saw Sister Hazel a few times, small clubs, festivals. Good times. They liked to tell you they were from Gainesville Florida, like their origin story was punctuation.
This always struck me as a sweet song.
Otherwise, after a time, the sound gets a little repetitive. It’s a good time, easy breezy sound, though, and I’m always happy when they came on. I played this CD a lot around my apartment. Upbeat stuff helps with late night work, I guess.
Sister Hazel, another band celebrating the 20th anniversary of a record this year, are still touring. They have nine dates booked this spring. I wonder what members of a band and their crews do with these thoroughly achievable schedules. (There are a few documentaries about touring road crews out there. It seems like a daunting job.)
