After my first marriage ended, I suffered from insomnia for a number of years and as a result spent many a late night channel surfing in the dark in the living room of my first post-divorce apartment. As such, I came across many tunes (such as this week's) on either MTV or VH-1 that have been, or will be, featured here on Friday Night Jukebox. While I certainly wouldn't endorse it as a good way to find new music, if you're one of those people always looking for a silver lining...there you go.
Train formed in my old stomping grounds, the city of San Francisco, in 1993. Over the course of their first few years they recruited the members that would make up their original incarnation, and self-released their first album. In 1998 Columbia Records took a chance on them and it paid off handsomely, as the band had its first of many hits to come. Over the last twenty-eight years, Train has sold over ten million albums and thirty million tracks. For their career, they have released ten studio albums (with five hitting the top ten) and thirty-four singles (with three reaching the top ten). The band is still recording and touring, with lead singer Pat Monahan being the only original member remaining (though some past members continue to play periodically with whatever current line-ups the band is presenting).
Fun Fact: Train's mega-hit, "Hey Soul Sister" is the greatest selling single in the history of Columbia Records, which considering that Columbia has been around longer than I have (sixty-two years and counting) and has had numerous substantial artists (Aretha, Dylan, and Springsteen come immediately to mind) is quite a feat.
"Meet Virginia" was released in 1999 as the second single from their major label debut LP, the cleverly titled Train. The single would be the first hit of their career, reaching #20 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100, while the album peaked at a rather pedestrian #76.
Train is one of those bands that ordinarily I would shrug my shoulders at, being just so much vanilla pudding, but for some odd ass reason I find myself with five of their songs on my Spotify playlist and can honestly say for all their generic flavor I find them quite tasty. "Meet Virginia" was the first of those singles, and it laid the groundwork for most of those to come. Monahan has a voice that's tailor made for singing rocking pop songs, and the band is more than capable of providing the chops and the hooks to keep you singing along. With this week's song, the band tells the tale of a free spirited woman with both a heart of gold and a head full of questions that might never be answered. It's a nice study, and the band fills her and her story with just the right amounts of passion and compassion. It's a real gift to have the ability to write a song that sounds like new twenty-two years down the road, and Train has done that for me with a song that sounds just as good today as it did when I first heard it late one sleepless night in a dark living room....
Lyric Sheet: "She doesn't own a dress/Her hair is always a mess/If you catch her stealin' she won't confess/She's beautiful....
Enjoy:
The Republican Party Is Now a Fascist Cult Just Like Nazi Germany
Peace,
emaycee
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