This is another LUDLOW song about isolated moments and feelings being the most emotionally compelling and fully lived parts of our lives -- and it's probably no coincidence that the music has that '70s pop feel since I first experienced this as a tot walking around with a little red transistor radio listening to people like Elton John, Raspberries and Andy Gibb. It's not the first song about the magic and mystery of hearing a great song being pulled from the ether by a radio, though it might be the last the way things are going.

The "singing girl" in question refers to an Australian band called Clouds who we played with a few times in the mid '90s. They had a song called "Alchemy's Dead" that absoluely destroyed me, and the intertwining vocal lines of the two female singers were similar to mine and Rob Cassell's in the early days of Cockeyed Ghost ("Walking In Winter" on NEVEREST was also inspired by Clouds, particularly the ending).

But the song is also about the magic of the mix tape/CD. How you can be the most obscure no-name band in the history of the world, but someone can put you on a mix tape, and someone else can hear it go by, drive the car a little faster while it's playing and say "that song kicks ass!" when it's over. And maybe you're flipping burgers somewhere, but you have no idea that for four minutes, you made a complete stranger happy. In fact, the fact that you're flipping burgers makes it a little more mystical somehow. Being a no-name myself I derive great comfort from that. Like "You Don't Know Me" (but much less bitterly) the song states that there's honor and perhaps something profound in just doing what you do well and bringing whatever happiness, however small, you can to people in so doing.

The words to the choruses are ridiculously difficult to remember and to sing. In keeping with LUDLOW's exhaustive ethic, it originally had a completely different set of choruses, with much simpler, but more cliched, lyrics. I thought they were lame and undercut the song and this is what I came up with to replace them. Poor Robert (and now Teresa) had to sing the high parts, keep track of the words, and play the difficult and syncopated walking bass line, all at the same time. No wonder he left the band not long afterward...likewise, we wound up rerecording the piano in the intro. There was nothing wrong with the original track technically, in fact there was a nice little solo, but it was too "look at me." We'd made a rule there would be zero "ego playing" on LUDLOW and that went for me too. We got rid of it and put in something simpler.

This may be the most pure pop song I've ever done. Proud of it, too!