Help me hear this song again

April 25, 2019 8:04 AM

I know scraps of a song I had on an old mixtape, probably from a Seattle band. Do you know it? Could you help me find it? I am very good at the Googles and this is evading me. It's about some sciencey/museum women who come into a small town in the summertime and are observed by a bored dude and his friends. Singer has a deep voice like the guy in Crash Test Dummies or Handsome Family (but it's not them, it's some smaller band). It's got some fiddle solos. It's in a singsongy spoken voice. Here are the lyrics I remember. I am aware memory is fallible, so they are something like this but I'm pretty sure about the beginning and the end.

(definitely starts this way)

Fiiiiive, educated women, came into my/our town.
There was me, Matt, [name] [othername] and Matt's little brother
.
.
Too smart for war, far too dumb for the college
.
.
Thought it might rain
"I hope it does" said the woman named Amanda/Miranda
.
.
[name] said "stand up when a woman walks in,
so we stood up
and, the women all grinned
I sat back down and..."
.
.
[women describing what they are doing, paleontology?]
[name] said "museums"
[the women go into the store looking for...]
Flashlight batteries and stupid bumperstickers
[they all come out laughing, there may be a fiddle solo]
Matt looked back and he couldn't see his brother
He was gone, gone with the women
Even took the candy that tasted like lemons.
[end]

posted by jessamyn to Grab Bag (11 answers total)

If you remember enough of the melody of the song you can try using the app SoundHound for iOS or Android and see if it will match it. I tried humming a song I remembered my dad humming to me when I was a small child and it matched it successfully. I also tried using the app Shazam but had no luck with it.
posted by eatcake at 8:24 AM on April 25, 2019

Do you have a ballpark time frame? Do you think this is from the 90's? Or is it more recent than that?
posted by Jacob G at 8:38 AM on April 25, 2019

Oh gosh sorry. This would've been probably mid 90s.
posted by jessamyn at 12:28 PM on April 25, 2019

(OMG flashbacks of Cordelia's Dad at the Iron Horse). Could it have been a Happy Valley or Boston band?
posted by clseace at 2:21 PM on April 25, 2019

Possibly yeah. Less likely but it's a mixtape so PacNW is just a general hand-wavey idea. I am going to have to get my cassette player going aren't I?
posted by jessamyn at 2:27 PM on April 25, 2019

A friend says those lyrics sound very much like an artist named Derek Horton, who somehow seems to have escaped being indexed by the Internet. Derek is a musician and theater artist who was producing works in Seattle in the 90s, including some obscure indie albums.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 10:57 PM on April 25, 2019

The lyrics don't ring a bell but the band description makes me think of an early-'90s Seattle duo called Like Rain. They barely exist on the internet and I can't find any songs, but they had a cassette called "Razorblade Shoes" and a CD called "Lightning Waltz."

If this sounds at all familiar I can try and track something down -- I may have the cassette in a trunk somewhere.
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 1:14 AM on April 26, 2019

This is "Lemonhead" by Johnny Webelo.

I did some Googling based on under_petticoat_rule's post above because "Derek Horton" seemed like a good lead. Some intense Googling found some old newspaper clippings that led me to Johnny Webelo, one of Horton's bands, which was noteworthy because if I squinted at the Amazon thumbnail of the CD cover I could see it included a song called "Lemonhead" that seemed like a possible, nay probable match for Jessamyn's lyrics. Against the odds, an active account called SongLyricsMania had recently posted two different Johnny Webelo songs to YouTube. I sent him a note asking him if he had "Lemonhead" and, after a week or so, he was kind enough to post it, confirming my hunch. He even transcribed the lyrics.

If you wanna do him a solid, give him a thumbs-up and subscribe to his channel I guess.
posted by Mothlight at 1:25 PM on May 7, 2019

OMG. Yay! And this little clip from The Stranger confirms that my FOAF Bruce Wirth was their fiddle player which is what I'd thought. I thumbsed up him and subscribed. Thank you all!
posted by jessamyn at 1:46 PM on May 7, 2019

This also explains why I thought it was Uncle Tupelo because it rhymes!
posted by jessamyn at 2:14 PM on May 7, 2019

Awesome. Glad jessamyn got her answer. Once I heard it the delivery sounds like old Beck.
posted by terrapin at 7:29 AM on May 10, 2019