What’s so great about this? Well, “Letting Go,” the fourth song on Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, for starters. Because when you decide that you like the album enough to research it a little (which you must, having heard it: John’s a great singer with a wonderfully England-in-the-seventies knack for a melody; the thick-milkshake indie rock guitars punch the same buttons that Dinosaur Jr. did in their prime; the harmonies are absolutely wonderful), you wind up running into the album’s fictitious backstory, which invokes the specter of death, effectively recontextualizing lyrics that never claimed to actually be about anything at all but which in light of their confusing relationship to reality seem eerily to predict a bunch of awful events, none of which actually happened, but all of which nevertheless seem to have deposited glowing little traces of themselves within the songs. And so the lyric to “Letting Go” (which, incidentally, starts off sounding vaguely like the Gun Club & had therefore won me completely over before it was even eight bars old) takes on a weight that it may or may not have earned — who knows? — but here it is: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 [ next ]