My Top 1000 Songs #792: Til I Hear It From You

[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.]

Another one from the Guilty Pleasures files? Probably. I mean, the Gin Blossoms felt like a guilty pleasure at the time, their jangly Americana-adjacent alt.rock getting the mainstream attention that seemed to unfairly evade Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks and Wilco etc.--yet, c'mon, New Miserable Experience was actually pretty good.

And then there's Empire Records, the abysmally cringe 1995 teen flick whose soundtrack this tune was written for. A movie so unrelentingly terrible that, any time it shows up on cable, however late at night, I will unfailingly watch it through the closing credits. WHY!?

But strip all that away, and "Til I Hear It From You" is a lovely, amiable jangle-pop gem, chock full of sweetness and an undeniable sing-along chorus. Not sure it's a "great" song so much as the sort of thing that fit snugly on every mixtape anyone ever made in the 90s, a perfect document of the era that captures the vibe as well as any of the much cooler music I was more proudly playing. Plus, a bit of a ringer, with a Marshall Crenshaw co-writing credit.

Live on Letterman: