Interlude: Band I Never Saw Live, Never Owned an Album By — But Dang It, I Wish I Had.
My Favorite — “Burning Hearts” (2002)
I was reminded of My Favorite earlier this week when I read Kip Berman’s (of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart) contribution to the Pitchfork Guest List, 2000s Edition. He pretty much summed up their awesomeness better than I ever could:
Life is hardly ever fair, but in a just world My Favorite would have been everyone’s. A few years later, it was commonplace to cite as influences John Hughes movies, Morrissey, and Orange Juice— and the Killers, Interpol, and M83 made lovely use of similar lyrical themes and sounds on albums that rightly achieved iconic status in their own time. But while it’s hard to credit a band for being doubly anachronistic (making literate 80s pop 10 years too late and 5 years before it was fashionable again to do so), My Favorite, with their perpetual underdog status, seems to be the Anvil of our generation— the band that was too pure to succeed.
Indeed.
