My Top 1000 Songs #942: My Boyfriend

[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.]

One of those songs that immediately transports me back to college. "My Boyfriend," a 1983 single from Hoboken band The Cucumbers, probably didn't get quite as much enthusiastic play outside of New Jersey college radio, but we did our part to promote the band to anyone who would listen. It's a silly little new wave-tinged jangly pop song, a basic 3-chord riff paired with adorable lyrics, more charm than chops, but sometime charm is enough. Singer Deena Shoshkes and husband Jon Fried got their arms around twee long before it was a thing, and I've been humming the song ever since. 

While they may be best remembered for this track (which got a little bit of late night MTV attention), they have a respectable body of similarly fun, quirky work (with the early stuff collected on a worthy compilation, 2016's The Fake Doom Years), continuing to release music both as the Cucumbers and on various Shoshkes solo albums.

Alternate version:

Live in the studio, 2010: