Song of the Day: "Ghost of Stephen Foster"

"Ghost of Stephen Foster"

Squirrel Nut Zippers

from Perennial Favorites

1998

You can enjoy certain kinds of music and understand that there is a time and a place for it. You can defend a band or an album or a song in one context and still get embarrassed by it in another. You can rue the day you ever fell for an album because it most likely blocked you from getting laid.

I was seventeen, and I was on a cruise ship. I was young and confident. My parents couldn't give less of a shit what I was doing for the next seven days. I was with two of my best friends. The ship was our oyster, as they say. There will never be a better time to kiss a girl and never speak to her again.

As it turns out, there are two girls around our age just across the hallway. They seem intrigued by the boy across the way, and especially appreciative of the chutzpa it took to knock on their door out of the blue, just to say hi and introduce himself and invite them over before they went out that night (whatever constituted "out" when you're a teenager on a cruise ship). He seemed cool and confident; let's go say hello.

Squirrel Nut Zippers, if you weren't around in the '90s, is a swing revival band best known for their out-of-nowhere minor radio hit, "Hell." I wasn't around in the '90s, so I didn't know this. I had only heard that they were associated with Andrew Bird, so I picked up this album at a record store somewhere (back when record stores existed), and weirdly came to appreciate it.

(I'm not gonna lie, I appreciate it even more now, almost at the tail end of a Boardwalk Empire binge. This is music that Chalky White would listen to as he stood in the back of his club looking angry and forlorn. This isn't "cool" music. It can be catchy, and "Ghost of Stephen Foster" is especially catchy, but it is not cool. Not by any standard. Not by today's standards. Certainly not by Summer 2006 Cruise Ship standards.)

I can like music and still be embarrassed by it. I will probably never be more embarrassed than when two buxom southern belles walked in our bedroom with a certain gleam in their eyes, just as goddamn motherfucking Squirrel Nut Zippers' 1998 pirate shanty deep cut "Ghost of Stephen Foster" came on shuffle, and they asked "What is this?" in that way that you just know you blew your chance, your one chance, and that's it.