Album: Amazing Disgrace
Year: 1996
. . .
One of the reasons that Amazing Disgrace is my favorite Posies album (though just barely, truth be told) is that it successfully combined the fuzzy noisy guitars from Frosting on the Beater with some of the dynamic mid-tempo songs that worked so well on Dear 23.
So yeah, while there were ravers like “Daily Mutilation,” “Ontario” and the utterly awesome “Grant Hart,” what truly made Amazing Disgrace were the weird, moody mid-tempo songs like “Song #1,” “Will You Ever Ease Your Mind?” and Jon Auer’s “Throwaway,” which starts out with a guitar solo that is falling apart before your eyes before coming to a dead stop in time for Auer’s first verse, the opening which was just sung over an acoustic guitar.
I remember giving up the gory details
And it left me tongue-tied (such an elementary sickness)
And then, as the drums kick in, all of that time spent playing Big Star songs kicks in, as Auer wraps a long-gorgeous Bell-like melody over the second half of the verse.
Now I don’t want to think and I don’t want to feel
I wasn’t aware that this was part of the deal
And that’s kinda how it goes: the first part of each verse is pretty enough, but the second part all Big Star, with the final bit leading to the chorus which is simply a harmonized repetition of “I don’t have it now”
And outside of a guitar solo where Auer starts with the melody line from the verse and then goes in an different direction, that’s pretty much it. But because “Throwaway” tosses in weird stops and starts, breaks and builds it actually feels trickier than it really is. And besides, mid-30s Jim was always going to be a sucker for any song with a verse like:
So I keep hiding and it only grows to hurt me
But time is wasting and I’m watching it desert me
I’m digging a hole and I’m making it deep
And I’m starting to question the hours that I keep
When Amazing Disgrace came out, I had either just started or was on the verge of starting at Organic Online, building websites for evil multinational corporations like Sony, McDonalds and Nike, and indeed, I was dealing with the fact that more than once, we had to pull all-nighters to hit deadlines, which raised all kinds of hell with me physically and emotionally, because I didn’t have the kind of structured schedule in which I thrive the best.
In any event, the weirdness and confusion that permeated a song like “Throwaway” was absolutely perfect for my state of mind, and the great melodies and harmonies — of course — didn’t hurt, either.
“Throwaway”
“Throwaway” live 2016
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The Certain Songs Database
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.
Certain Songs Spotify playlist
(It’s recommended that you listen to this on Spotify as their embed only has 200 songs.)
Support “Certain Songs” with a donation on Patreon
Go to my Patreon page