Song of the Week #6:
One of my criteria for a song to reach the dizzying heights of “all time favorite song” is that I can remember exactly when and how I first heard it. If history holds, then XTC’s “Then She Appeared” will, several years and many thousands of playings from now, will be one of my all time favorite songs.
Suzan and I were watching a Gillmore Girls rerun last weekend and, at the end of one episode where main character Rory kisses Jess (brooding guy she has chosen over nice pretty boy from the ‘neighb) for the first time, the gorgeous shimmering guitars undulate under their pre-smootch awkward chatter. At the moment of lip contact, the volume swells and, as Suzan swooned, I yelped That’s XTC!”
I’d only been watching the show for a few weeks so the Rory/Jess tension meant nothing to me. Neither really had XTC, whom I only known through “The Mayor of Simpleton”, which my friend Jeremy hooked my up with in college and Suzan’s old copy of their American breakthrough album Skylarking. I found them quirky, charming, and too weird by half. I’m a musicial lunkhead, perferring songs that poke me in the eye with their attractive qualities, instead of asking me to find them through the opacity of lyrics about Rutherford B. Hayes and reverse amplification of the sitar.
“Then She Appeared” is none of these things (and neither is the rest of the XTC catalog, I discovered after wrongly assuming otherwise). It’s a simple, fulsome pop tune about being struck stupid by a beautiful woman. In the hands of a less skilled band, It’d be an asmatic cliche’, rock grist for the “nothing-was-the-same-after-I-saw-you” mill. XTC instead captures this overworn moment of first love as just that–a moment. The setting sun of the lead guitar and the plaintive sigh of Andy Patridge’s lead vocal hint that the moment will pass but for its 4 minutes, you hold it (and her) between your hands and the beauty takes your breath away.
Download Then she appeared.mp3 (3625.2K)
Where were you when you heard one of your favorite songs?