A mention of SongExploder a couple of weeks’ ago1 brought to mind the episode of that great podcast series which is the favourite of mine (and I expect, a lot of others) – where Semisonic’s Dan Wilson relates the process of writing their anthemic hit, Closing Time, with a life-affirming coda.
Weirdly, for a period of time circa 2020, Semisonic’s album Feeling Strangely Fine became the one on permanent rotation in our family car,2 as Child #1 began making his way through his father’s CD collection. Just as COVID hit, it was nearing ubiquity, Late in 2020, when their father was often busy multi-tracking audio recordings for church services (remember when that was briefly an apparent necessity?) we had a sidebar recording children’s songs for our own amusement – children’s songs, and a full-band composite of Closing Time.3
Until then, although I like Semisonic generally, I probably primarily associated this song with its repeated use at the end of live events, circa 2010–11. But the aforementioned SongExploder episode takes it to another level. Dan Wilson is one of the more prolific modern American songwriters, but he seems OK with this one being his epitaph.
On the YouTube video, one of the top comments says, ‘Cheer up – in only 64 years it’ll be the ’90s again.’ Sometimes it seems weird that Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem to be developing a weird hazy, warm feeling towards that decade – but the rock scene, from the grunge to the pop, was absolutely sensational.
In the next entry, we’ll pick up on the theme of children nicking their father’s CDs, but as an entry into grown-up music – this one was pretty good.
- See track 16. ↩︎
- …displacing, after more than a year, Colin Buchanan’s Colin’s Favourites, Vol. 1, most of which I could play and sing from memory at that point. Colin Buchanan probably won’t get an entry in this series, but is worthy of a mention: he will be best-known to the widest audience as the co-writer on a popular Christian worship song, Jesus, Strong & Kind (and I very much value another track also written with Cityalight, The Night Song), but to a significant subset of Christians – particularly Australian ones – he is an absolute phenomenon. A legit country singer-songwriter with a famous Christmas novelty hit, Colin turned to writing Christian music for children in the 1990s and is – and I do not say this lightly, but it is only my opinion – perhaps one of the finest expositors of Biblical theology alive on the earth today, taking deep concepts and recounting them for under-10s with silly voices and guitar riffs. Our family are immensely grateful for all his songs have embedded in our lives, with and without puppet accompaniment. ↩︎
- I just booted up the Adobe Audition files out of interest. That is a lot of percussion tracks. ↩︎