These two albums have always been a pair in my mind but I’ve never listened to them both in the same sitting.
I discovered Sunny Day Real Estate with this record, and thought I had discovered the band I would follow for years. I was disappointed and then stunned to find out that not only had they since broken up, two members had gone on to participate in another album I’d recently discovered, The Colour and The Shape.
In some ways, the Pink Album had to be the messy and half-hearted process it was for us to have the Foo Fighters album we have, even if only a few of Goldsmith’s drum parts remain.
This is certainly my favorite SDRE album mostly for emotional reasons but it also gave us emo anthems “8” (the song that originally blew my young mind wide open when I stumbled onto it on the Batman Forever sound track of all places.), as well as the onomatopoeically titled “J’nuh”, with the riff that launched a thousand emo bands.
The Colour and The Shape had 3 huge singles that almost everyone knows but New Way Home is the track I had in mind when I thought about getting this on vinyl. Simply put though, every track is great and the production is bristling with energy.
The Batman Forever soundtrack was a pivotal album of my formative years. Sunny Day Real Estate, Mazzy Star, Method Man, The Flaming Lips, Massive Attack, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Michael Hutchence’s Iggy Pop cover. All bangers.
I didn’t even realize there was all that on there! I eventually came to a lot of those separately but just happened to hear that one song while borrowing my big sister’s idiot fiancée’s car one afternoon. It just happened to be the thing he’d put into his CD player. He definitely was not the type to appreciate any of those artists, or even music in general. He was definitely the type of person whose collection was entirely soundtracks and NOW That’s What I Call CDs.
He was such a colossal douchebag, and yet I have to live with the irony that he unintentionally changed the trajectory of my musical life.