My Top 1000 Songs #347: Crush Story
My wife isn't a music fan. She'll always love the 15 or 20 songs she remembers from high school, but beyond that, not so much. (But great wife that she is, she indulges my obsession and lets me run the stereo.) Back in college and law school, before we married, I'd give her the occasional mixtape to try to educate her on my taste, but not much of it stuck.
So it says something that, every now and then, she'll start randomly singing the chorus from Too Much Joy's "Crush Story." I put it on a tape for her when it came out--honestly, is there a song more perfectly crafted for a mixtape you're making for your girlfriend?--and while I haven't played it around her too many times since then, she can still sing the damn thing word for word.
It's that kind of song.
While the track, off their terrific 1991 Cereal Killers album, has a perfect power pop hook, the band's harder-edged punk-ish roots keep it from sounding like just another pop song, a little more squarely in the early 90s pre-Nirvana alt.rock wheelhouse; and vocalist Tim Quirk supplies some trademark clever lyrics to ensure the song doesn't get anywhere close to sappy. Let's give him the final word here:
"Everything you've ever said is brilliant. Anything you wanna do is fine with me. This is much better than love, babe; this is a crush story."
The video:Happy audience at a reunion gig last year:
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