One of my favourite songs of all-time. I LOVE Soul Asylum's "Cartoon". Thinking a lot recently about all the great music I discovered in 1992, seeing this late at night as 120 Minute's 'Time Warp' section (though really only 4 years old). And this was before we had driving licenses and had to rely on our parents to take us to the cool record stores scattered around the state. I fell in love with this song the minute I heard it and anxiously awaited buying 'Hang Time', in my opinion their best album (other great songs including "Sometime To Return", "A Little Too Clean" and, well, Side 1 really). I fondly remember Brian Ewing's dad taking us to Cutler's in New Haven and Bri insisting on getting it for me, as a present, but refering to it as a "prise" (short for "surprise", which it wasn't) for reasons known only to himself. A few months later, Soul Asylum were to get huge with 'Grave Dancers Union' but we were lucky enough to see them right before that happened, at Toad's Place with The Lemonheads (about to score big with "It's A Shame About Ray", an album we also fell in love with that summer, so this gig was really really exciting) and Walt Mink.
It's really hard to talk about songs that mean so much to you, isn't it? But "Cartoon" always has meant quite a lot to me, perhaps best summed up in its lyric "Did it almost make you feel something's gotta happen soon? Then you wake up feeling lost in your own room". It's like life, really. Hopeful melancholy, being stuck but still able to dream, never quite being completely down and out, or if you are, still going for it anyway. It possesses that quality sung in the lines of one of my other all-time favourite songs (also discovered around that time), "makes you wanna feel, makes you wanna try, makes you wanna blow the stars from the sky".
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