Saturday, February 2, 2013

Music Lessons: Sunny Day Real Estate

Michael doesn't like to play favorites with bands, but we all know that Sunny Day Real Estate is his favorite. It was one of the first bands he played for me when we were dating, and I thought to myself, "Ugh! What is up with the singer's voice?" I actually might have said it outloud, causing Michael to wonder if I was really someone he wanted to be dating.

Eleven years later, I'm 3/4 of the way done with that Novel No One But Me Will Ever Read, in which two of the characters are obsessed with Sunny Day Real Estate. In the course of working on that novel, I listened to Sunny Day's albums umpteen-million times, and this very strange thing happened. I sort of, kind of like them now. Sssshhh...don't tell Michael.



In my opinion (and I held this opinion even before I started to like their music), if you are in any way a serious lover of music, you should at least know who Sunny Day Real Estate is. They are a band's band - the type of band that failed commercially but managed to have a major impact on today's music. As one example - here's Hayley Williams from Paramore giving a tribute to the band. Two members of Sunny Day also went on to become part of the Foo Fighters.

2 comments:

  1. Even though you've come around to good sense and now like Sunny Day Real Estate, I think it's interesting that we like them for different reasons. My least favorite album is your favorite and it's the one you picked a song from for this blog post. While I like their older, more mature sound, when I think of Sunny Day I'm always drawn to their more raw, more emotional, more chaotic early stuff, especially The Pink Album.

    For instance, when I was 15 or 16 I heard their song "8" (I think it was on the Batman Forever soundtrack). It was unlike anything else I'd ever heard and after I bought their album it stayed in my car's tape player almost non-stop for months. I couldn't find anyone else really who liked them in my small Tennessee hometown, but I was hooked.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqtQBU3DEuA

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