2003-09-18 - 5:27 p.m.

i have a song following me around right now. maybe you do, too. mine is 'boys of summer' by don henley. henley has always been a guilty pleasure of mine, tucked right in beside elton john, steely dan, and the doobie brothers. i have no explanation, other than i was of an impressionable age in southern california during the seventies. i'm a sucker for anything my dad had on eight-track.

sometime in july, i decided to learn 'boys of summer' to perform with my band. we often start with a pop song and sort of melt its constituent parts into something ambient and disturbing. 'boys of summer' has the right balance of cheesiness and poignancy for this trick to work. the song structure is simple and it has a gorgeous Cadd9 chord recurring often enough to induce a melancholy nostalgia.

while visiting my parents in southern california in august, i went to the gym with my dad. while attempting to beat an elliptical trainer into submission, i heard a familiar chord progression over the speakers. but it wasn't don henley performing the song, it was a slickly produced LA-style thrash band. they sped up the song and added quite a bit more distortion, but were otherwise remarkably faithful to the original. i consider myself something of a connoiseur of covers and i think its a pretty good one, though i can't in good conscience endorse their lyric change in the third verse.

i heard the cover again last night, in my friend's car driving home over the williamsburg bridge. i told f how the song was taking on some larger significance in my life. later, we were both in the 24-hour mart and the original song came on the radio.

'see, the song is stalking me.'

'no, it isn't.'

'come on! what are the odds?'

'it's don henley, so i don't think its so unusual. besides, you're just having plate of shrimp'.

'what? plate of shrimp? explain.'

'its from repo man. its like when you think of a plate of shrimp, and then someone walks past you with a plate, and you overhear someone else say "shrimp", and then pretty soon you are sitting down to a big plate of shrimp.'