Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 37: Nate

Prompt: "A song whose title starts with the first letter of your last name and ends with the last letter of your first name"

Selected by Nate

"Awake Man"

Guided by Voices

Welshpool Frillies, 2023

First terrible prompt of the campaign. It's no easy thing to cook up all these prompts and ire at a prompt should not be perceived as ire against our editor, publisher, and benefactor. That said, Joe fucked the dog on this one, and he should personally feel bad.

Derangement comes in many forms and often without warning or awareness until the damage has occurred and the cloud has passed. In some cases, those pure of heart and conscious of self can recognize when they are in the grips of mania, and can either try to swim out of the riptide or enjoy the rush out into the deep seas of madness. Hey, on a completely separate thought that is in no way connected to that first thing I said up there just one sentence ago, does anyone want to listen to this playlist I made of roughly 40 different covers of the same Guided by Voices song? I've been playing this nearly non-stop for a week and I don't think I'll stop anytime in the next one.

"Awake Man" isn't as good as "Game of Pricks," but nothing on any Guided by Voices album of the last fifteen or so years is as good as anything from the first fifteen or so years. What's admirable is the consistency, the relentless output, the drive to continue to create with no fear or concern. That's admirable as hell, even though it makes GBV the province of maniacs.

Anyway, my favorite cover of "Game of Pricks" is probably this one, the most inventive reinterpretation is probably this one, and my least favorite is this stinker. What a song. What a band. What an odd manifestation of mental illness.