Song #57: Matthew Good Band - Going All The Way (off Beautiful Midnight - 1999)
I’m still technically in the middle of my “15 Albums that Changed my Life” meme thing, despite my month-long hiatus. I think I intended to post every day, and then just… didn’t?
Anyway, here’s a recap of the albums I’ve listed so far:
- Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
- Suzanne Vega - Suzanne Vega
- Marie-Mai - Dangereuse Attraction
- Plumtree - Predicts The Future
- Matthew Barber - Means & Ends
- Two Hours Traffic - Little Jabs
- Sloan - Between the Bridges
- Melissa Etheridge - Yes I Am
I wasn’t even sure I was going to post today, but inspiration (and desire to procrastinate) can come from the most unlikely places…
I go to karaoke every week with BK and a few others (who vary from week to week). As sometimes happens in this wonderful city, I run into people from my past. I don’t have a great relationship with Past Allegra (see almost every entry for details), but she had some wonderful friends. One of them is Andrea (who celebrated her birthday yesterday), a beautiful, intelligent girl whom I knew from middle and high school. I ran into her and another former acquaintance at karaoke and I’m so glad I did.
Seeing Andrea again reminded me of all the music she introduced to me over the ten years we’ve known each other. She was the guitarist in the first of my short-lived girl bands (and we wrote a song together!), was the first person to play The Who’s Tommy for me, show me Rocky Horror or jam Heart tunes with me. We were the middle school’s french horn players (which may have been when we really bonded) but possibly the most LASTING recommendation she made occurred when she lent me Beautiful Midnight by the Matthew Good Band. Of course I’d heard “Load Me Up” and “Hello Time Bomb” on the radio, but hearing them in the context of an ALBUM was completely new.
To steal a friend’s facebook quote, “Sometimes I hear a piece of music that makes me think, ‘Damn, I wish real life was like this,’ and then I remember that real life is like this because someone really made the music…”
Matthew Good’s music has influenced my life a lot over the last ten years. There used to be a pretty good independent coffee shop across the street from my house, and I struck up a really good friendship(-and-kind-of-more-for-a-while?) with a dude who worked there. It all started when I recognized “Mercy Misses You” one morning in the summer of 2005. Free tea, decaf lattes, even brownies (!) followed. We’re still friends, though I don’t see him often enough. He and I ALSO have had a jam session, and he copied Matt Good’s guitar stylings when writing the chords to some of my lyrics.
For the past two hours, BK and I have been exchanging Matt Good stories. I remember our first date, which wasn’t really going so well. He knew very little of Sloan, I was over-neurotic about everything else… our first common ground was Matt Good. We saw different stops of the same tours and share a lot of the same favourite songs (including “Going All The Way”).
Every so often I revisit Beautiful Midnight, and it still hits me as hard as it did when Andrea first lent it to me. Christine, I think, wrote an excellent blurb on its greatness that appeared in a 2005 issue of a mercifully defunct Canadian music rag, “…I remember walking through downtown Toronto one night around 3 a.m., listening to “Suburbia” and “Running for Home” on my discman. And as the hustle and bustle of the 20th century quietly died in the night, I realized how small and precious we all are.”
