My Top 1000 Songs #697: Skull

[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.] 

Sebadoh's "Skull" had a feeling of being somehow lost in time when it first appeared on 1994's Bakesale, sounding like a vital part of the emerging crew of 90s indie stalwarts like Pavement and Yo La Tengo and Guided By Voices while vividly conjuring moments out of a not-so-distant past. Both the lyrics--"There is history in this place, there are dragons to be chased"--and Lou Barlow's reliably yearning, vulnerable vocals, call to mind childhood breaking loose into confused adolescence. (I view it as of a piece with Miracle Legion's wonderful "The Backyard" from a decade earlier.)

Hearing it today, it's like a double-dose of nostalgia, dropping me back into a 70s/80s cusp-of-teen-years confusion as well as the just-starting-to-figure-it-out 90s indie vibe of my early adulthood. I don't listen to Sebadoh nearly as much now as I did back then, but that odd, stoner-youth chorus refrain of "gently take my skull for a ride" is one of those lines that just creeps on me at random times.

Live 2011:

Lou Barlow solo acoustic: