Lots of songs were about love on the radio: It was an endless well of clichéd inspiration. Hits like “Follow You Down” and “‘Til I Hear It From You” were less traditional love songs than explorations of love as a concept we still had time to ruin for ourselves. It’s easy to bury a band like Gin Blossoms in the sands of nostalgia, but what we’re really burying are the memories of our lives when they were free to be chaotic. Gin Blossoms were there for me every step of the way. They were the soundtrack to formative moments spent in daytime customer service locations with access to a radio station, waiting in line at the bank, getting your tires changed. Every band in existence was from somewhere that felt untouchable. I didn’t know where they were from, and it didn’t really matter. A group of guys from Tempe, Arizona, they were one of a few bands we’d label “jangle-pop” (a term that loosely translates to “all treble”). ![]() Gin Blossoms were the darlings of 9-to-5 radio stations that bragged about never playing the same song twice. You could choose to sit idly with your thoughts in the moments you had to yourself, or you could lose yourself to the rhythm of radio-friendly ‘90s alt-rock. ![]() And it was an opportunity to listen to the radio. Working in a grocery pushed me out of my shell and into a world where I was forced to interact daily with members of the public. At school, I was still the kid who cried during eighth grade math, far past the age when that was socially acceptable. I didn’t know much of anything outside of my immediate family. I was a baby in endless ways, the world a secret to me still. (There was a secret war being waged on the French-speaking population of our town, and we fought on the front lines, making it confusing for francophones to find Del Monte brand whole-kernel corn.) But to me, they were so much more.Īt a time in my life when the grocery store’s overhead PA system was my lifeline, Gin Blossoms were my alt-rock radio saviors - raining down hard truths about lust masquerading as love as I sat on a milk crate, turning cans so all the labels faced the same direction, always English side out. ![]() It was the summer of 1995 Toy Story was a new movie that challenged our expectations of animation and Randy Newman we were beginning to grapple with the reality of the Frappuccino and we flirted with Pogs as the next Marbles. I was 13 going on 14 when I started working at a family-run supermarket in Whitehorse, Yukon called Food Fair.
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