Those Songs, #1

I was considering writing a big list of the best 100 songs of the 00s ("the decade that never had a good nickname") for this blog, and got quite excited about it, because the recurring "00" is kind of nice visually. I soon realised, though, that any old twat can write a list of pieces of recorded sound first created in some arbitrary time period. It's been done to death and double-death.

You know when you're talking about music, about a song you love, and the best way you can get across to people what it means to you is by saying "It's just one of those songs"?

These are my those songs.

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Face Like Summer (The Blue Trees EP, 2000)

I know I've whacked the picture up there, but I haven't got that EP. Not even on MP3, even though I could click around for a while and have it torrented by morning. I got this track off a cover compilation from Select magazine, back when magazines made of paper existed (I believe they were "sold" in something called "smiths"). I found the tracklist online, and it confirms my memory that when I first span that CD, Face Like Summer was the standout, the one that jumped into my face like a track-in-the-box. I liked the Soulwax Prince cover and the pre-boring-period Snow Patrol song too, but I'll not digress.

Face Like Summer is quite a sad song. Not industrial-grade Merritt-sad, the sort of sad that smiles at you while it's dragging a razor across its throat, but still fairly melancholy by anyone's standards. Through my ears, though, it's heartbreaking. I don't kiss and tell (and these days, I mainly just don't kiss), but I'm sure you'll understand how a lyric like "so young in years / probably end in tears" could be a little wounding to someone who's finally developed the power of hindsight. And yet there's an upside: at the end of the song, the uneasy, stomach-sick romance of the first verses blossoms into a sun-filled, harmonious coda which seems to go on forever, and could, and I'd never press stop. With every repeat, it gives a reminder to even the most jaded and grumpy of us that all you need is one thing. It could be a face like summer, or hair like fire, or an accent, or a cute hat, or freckles or a laugh or a look of surprise. That little thing you love.

And I know that's where it begins.