My Top 1000 Songs #897: 100,000 Fireflies
[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.]
This track off Magnetic Fields' 1991 debut, Distant Plastic Trees, isn't necessarily one of my favorite cuts from the Stephin Merritt songbook--hell, I could list a dozen tunes off 69 Love Songs I'd love to include on this list--but there's still something magical about the song. The opening bars, with their chiming Christmas-y toy keyboards, and Susan Amway's charming vocals wrapped around some wiggy lyrics ("I have a mandolin, I play it all night long, it makes me want to kill myself"), have always lured me from the very start. And when the music drops down and Amway hits "I'm afraid of the dark without you close to me"--well, damn, I'm just destroyed.
Frankly, the song could end after that line, 60 seconds of conflicted, mournful jubilation, and I'd be fine; the rest of the song almost seems like surplus.
And as an added bonus: Superchunk's remake as a blazing, electrified post-punk rocker (on a 1993 b-side, later included on the compilation Incidental Music 1991-1995), makes it two great songs for the price of one.
The original:
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