Day 3: Your favourite album track
Matt Nathanson - Then I’ll Be Smiling
Firstly…what the hell makes an “album track”? On most 12-track LPs, there are probably on average 9 tracks that are called “album tracks”. I had to narrow it down, because, well, most of what we listen to are “album tracks”. But how? Is an album track something that was clearly completely unsuitable for radio play? Is an album track something that would only work as part of an album? Something epic and sprawling? Something that needed the context of the surrounding tracks to make it work? In the end I went with “track that completely represented the album for me”. Represented thematically, represented musically, represented as the track that just grips you and says “this is what I’m about, do you get it?”. For it to be my favourite “album track”, the answer to that question is “YES, I GET IT”. So, here it is.
It’s from his LP ‘Still Waiting For Spring’. I’m not going to comment further on the song; you can glean everything I’d say here from the above.
