2000 Great Songs #1488: Damage

One of the tell-tale signs of a truly great album is that, even decades later, you still find yourself discovering moments (or even entire songs) you'd overlooked. Take 1997's epic I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, probably my favorite Yo La Tengo album. It's probably a tad overlong, one of those 90s CDs where an artist who would've had one of the greatest 40-minute LPs in history fills out the disc's longer running space with some songs that might've been fine as b-sides. Now, I personally don't mind this; I'm happy to condense a longer CD into a stronger, shorter one on my own, and I appreciate an artist giving me way too much music and letting me choose my own personalized version.

So on this CD so loaded with amazing, widely varied songs, ranging from noisy guitar freakouts to alt.rock pop songs to gentle ballads, there were a few tracks I tended to skip. And for awhile, one of those was "Damage," a quiet, atmospheric tune that, while awfully pretty, tended to get lost in the mix for me. Yet over the years, it's grown into one of my favorite Yo La Tengo songs (I heard a stunningly beautiful live rendition a few years ago, which sent me back to the CD to give it another chance). It's a wash of understated feedback and throbbing bass with some hushed, gorgeous backing vocals, yet incredibly insinuating to the point where I find myself whispering "the damage is done" in my head at the most random times. So, yeah, I'm glad they packed this CD with more music than I really needed and let me take my own sweet time really discovering it.

Live 2025:

Cover by Fiery Crash:

As sampled for this strange sonic piece by Kings of Woolworth:

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