My Top 1000 Songs #495: Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Returning once again to the deep well of Guided by Voices' 1994 classic Bee Thousand, we pluck out a tiny trifle of a song, barely a minute and a half long, which somehow manages to quickly capture what it is that hooked me on the band (and especially their fertile mid-90s run). It's one of those songs that's all but impossible to explain, and may not click right away, but you'll find playing mysteriously in your head for the rest of your life.

The typically indecipherable song--you can see it right there in the title--is particularly sparse, just Robert Pollard and an acoustic guitar, slow and pretty, a melody that kinda reminds me a little of Bing Crosby singing "Do You Hear What I Hear?" (or maybe I'm just crazy to think that?). And then you get a brief minor-key bridge before a bit of noise kicks in and the wallop comes, a few short lines and a drop-dead perfect hook: "She runs through the night as if nobody cares, she screams and she cries and ignores all the stares. She wants me to come, but I'm never going there." I dunno, it just kills me every time.

Perfectly translated to the stage as rousing sing-along indie rock anthem:

Beautiful cover from And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead: