100 favourite songs: #11: "Blue Thunder" - Galaxie 500

Stripped-back, bare, and resonant with echoes in its wilful walking of the line between elevation and despair; everything crashes in Galaxie 500’s music, and droning guitar lines and simple, repetitive chord progressions twist about the plaintive, reverb-drenched voice of singer Dean Wareham’s voice in a manner which is compelling precisely because of its starkness. It’s easy to drift away to this music, to immerse oneself in its glorious, yearning melancholy — but listen to it louder, and the dreams which come will be all the more intense. Anyway, “Blue Thunder” opens with the sound of a guitar being gently strummed, and immediately it feels as if the music has always been there; it’s with a sense of homecoming that one hears Wareham’s ethereal vocal enter the mix. For me, this will always be the Galaxie 500 song — plangently rising verses and glorious falsetto choruses, all underpinned by that same downbeat, rhythmic strumming, and finally culminating in a characteristically off kilter, weeping guitar solo. There’s more than a little of the Velvet Underground to Galaxie 500 (imagine “Pale Blue Eyes” played in the middle of a blizzard, while the cold sun is still visible above you), and truly, it’s not so far wrong to say that the fabric of this song must be something akin to all the different colours, made of tears. - 1/04

This song has always just made sense to me.