One song from "Additional Verses" a day, the final day
🔴 Track 8 on "Additional Verses" 🟢
🔴 The Buggles - "Video Killed the Radio Star" 🟢
For last, here's a story about my favorite song.
Have you ever had an amazing day just keep getting better and better, as -- against the odds -- incredibly unlikely events just keep stacking and resonating with one another? I think we all must have at some point. Hold that thought for a minute.
I like "Video Killed the Radio Star" quite a bit. I don't remember where or when I heard it first, but all the way back to the days when music was most accessible to me via cassette tape, I've been enamored with the duality, the juxtaposition of its cheerful energy and naked lament. If you're looking for the part where I explain where and how the song influenced my own art, put bluntly, it's that. And that isn't even to mention its beautiful extended outro, a melancholic-but-understated reprise built of strings, piano, and synths stippled with a coming-and-going cut of the backing vocal; it introduces itself like a markedly-too-late arrival to an unmissable event, making itself known, and known forever, after the song-at-large makes its fadeout exit.
The song has shown up here and there in my life. One time, in college, I was late to a media class and walked in just as the professor asked the class what the significance of the music video playing on the presentation screen was. I raised my hand as I walked toward an open seat, was called upon, and had answered "first music video on MTV" before I'd even sat down. I remember thinking "I know the song's old and MTV is irrelevant, but surely my late ass can't be quickest on the draw at that one in a room full of people who care about this kind of media?" I could be snarky and write "I guess I cared more", but as I write this, waxing poetic about what the song means to me and how I've lovingly sculpted an elaborate cover and saved it for last on my album, I don't have to. I do care more, full stop.
Do you still have that "amazing day" in mind? Good; coat your mind with it as I do the same. I was already having an excellent day. Don't remember why; no longer care. What I do remember is that I'd just started my drive home from the next town over. There's that moment where the radio comes on before your Bluetooth kicks in, and on the radio they'd just started playing "Video Killed the Radio Star". Cool, one of my favorites! So I left the radio tuned in and carried on with a smile on my face that I can still feel if I focus hard enough.
The thing about listening to music on the radio is that radio is, or at least it came to be, tighter than tight as a medium when it comes to holding onto your attention and keeping you from changing the station. Dead air is a sin, especially for a format posited to have been thoroughly "killed" 45 years ago. So the DJ talks over the song's intro, fades it out the very moment the song dares to come anywhere close to its end, promotes something the station is doing, cuts to ads, repeat. You never hear a song uninterrupted on the radio. Letting the music speak costs money when it's not speaking loudly enough.
So when I tell you that, on the radio that already-incredible day, they played the entire extended outro of "Video Killed the Radio Star", unaltered and undisturbed, and that I pulled over and cried into my hands, I mean it.
When I was testing out my final revisions to "Additional Verses", this song was the last that I had to make adjustments to, so I did so and took the album for a spin in the car as I went to visit family. The adjustments were right on, and the song (and by extension, the album) was finally done. That very visit, I happened to pass by their TV, tuned to Wheel of Fortune, where a puzzle was just about to be solved -- category, "one-hit wonder":
"VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR".
Listen to / download "Additional Verses" here.
