Music Literature Film Index About
   
  1990s

 

 

 

 

 

Painful, Yo La Tengo

Matador Records, October 5, 1993

Track Listing: 1. Big Day Coming, 2. From A Motel 6, 3. Double Dare, 4. Superstar-Watcher, 5. Nowhere Near, 6. Sudden Organ, 7. A Worrying Thing, 8. I Was The Fool Beside You For Too Long, 9. The Whole Of The Law, 10. Big Day Coming, 11. I Heard You Looking


You can sniff it. A storm is brewing and it’s gonna be big. Momentum is shifting. Has shifted. It really is that quick.

There’s a big day coming
About a mile away
There’s a big day coming and
I can hardly wait I can hardly wait”

-from “Big Day Coming

The controlled guitar feedback is like a distant rumble. Not immediately threatening, but inevitable and increasing. A change. A surreal swirl of storm clouds thrusts waves of gray and black across a rapidly closing sky. What once was is no longer. Temps plummet.

I’m lying down on top of a dingy, ugly-ass orange and red bedspread at a Motel 6 in God knows where. I lay on top of it because I don’t want to think about the sheets with their florescent light jizz stains or the roads of infidelity that have led a parade of bugs to this very oasis before me.

Blank stare at the TV
The howling II’s on channel 3
Oh, I drift off to sleep
While the snow falls on the screen”

-fromFrom a Motel 6

I wake up. Not exactly sure where. I get the feeling I should be somewhere else, but thinking so doesn’t transport me to any magic kingdom. Hardly. I’m in a car at a rest stop. It’s time to move on.

Does it makes sense to you, getting old, living life 22
Well, I don’t mind, if I don’t think about it
Let’s go far away
Let’s leave today”

-fromA Worrying Thing

Although I’m lost, I don’t think to ask for directions because I’m not sure where it is I’m going. I just know it’s going to be amazing once I get there. Sometimes, you just know things. I blink and prepare to head west without thinking too much more about it.

-G