I've spent all of my hardcore life not understanding the attraction that punks had to The Smiths. I didn't get it, and I could be coarse and biting in my attitude toward them. Yeah, you could call me a hater. My friend, Jeff, has tried for years to get me into them and I've just been like, no please stop. But if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you are probably aware of
when my brain glitched in 2023 and I changed my mind on a number of musical opinions.
My friend Sarah and I had been exchanging some songs for a bit that year, sharing things that we thought that the other person hadn't heard but may enjoy. She sent me two songs from The Smiths, This Night Has Opened My Eyes and I Know It's Over... and while I'd been surprised with how much I enjoyed all of the other songs that she'd introduced me to over the month or so that we'd been doing our project, I cringed a little bit when I saw that she sent me something from The Smiths. Still, I trusted her taste and the songs would pop up in my random daily playlists, and before I knew it, I really liked what I was hearing... and then that lead me to checking out and liking all of The Queen Is Dead... and then Meat Is Murder... and then, fuck, somehow I became a fan of The Smiths.
Jeff, of course, was thrilled that I finally came around on The Smiths, and when he was going through Tim's collection, he pulled out the
Louder Than Bombs comp double LP and handed it to me for free.
Admittedly, I was a bit lukewarm on this collection of singles and b-sides when I first heard it... but I'm like that with anything from The Smiths that I'm hearing for the first time. However, these songs have grown on me quite a bit over the recent weeks with repeat listens though, and I'm really starting to enjoy this.
So somehow, in the past couple of years, I've gone from being like, I hate The Smiths, to okay a couple of songs are good, then oh I guess I like these albums but I don't need to own them... oh shit, maybe I do want these in my collection... no but wait, I actually want the original UK pressings... and after I started to appreciate this collection of songs, fuck it, I want to own the original singles too. Phew... that was a wild ride. We'll see where it goes from here.
2 comments:
This was the first Smiths record that I listened to. I woke up one day in 2001 and just decided 'I want to listen to The Smiths' and I ended up with this on CD. Can't remember if I borrowed or bought it. But there are some of their best songs on here for sure.
It‘s funny how I could have almost written the same post, although I‘m not quite as far into the process... I hated them for the longest time, then I heard a cover of one of their songs without knowing it was one of their songs, but I really liked the song I was listening to. When I looked up the song, I learned that it was a song by The Smiths and that‘s how I got suckered into listening to them. It‘s funny how that works sometimes.
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