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We're Not Who You Think We Are

P.M. Dawn

Certain Songs #1590: P.M. Dawn – “The 9:45 Wake-Up Dream”

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Album: Jesus Wept
Year: 1995

One of the things that kept coming up as I did the research for these P.M. Dawn posts was just how slagged they were at the time for being out of step with what was going on with early 1990’s hip-hop.

And yeah, by the time of their third album, 1995’s Jesus Wept — named, of course, after the shortest verse in The Bible — if P.M. Dawn had very little in common with their hip-hop contemporaries, they also had little in common with anyone else, as their best songs are a psychedelic stew of hip-hop, soul, rock and gospel, and sound amazing all these years later.

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Certain Songs #1589: P.M. Dawn – “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine”

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Album: Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
Year: 1991

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I’ll admit that I slept on P.M. Dawn during the overstuffed musical year of 1991, partly because I was kinda overwhelmed with everything that was going on in my life, but also because I wasn’t all that wild about their one big hit, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” probably because it relied heavily on a sample of another song I never really liked, Spandau Ballet’s “True.”

I’ve softened on both songs (though you won’t be seeing “True” in this blog), but when I finally went back to explore P.M. Dawn’s catalog in the wake of Jesus Wept, the song that struck me from their debut Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience was “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine.”

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