Over the years my fandom of Soul Coughing has faded slowly. There are a few songs of theirs that I still enjoy immensely, but it's their weird songs like this one and Bus to Beelzebub. Part of it, I think, has to do with how absolutely neutered and commercially polished Mike Doughty's solo work is (specifically his desperately plea for an adult contemporary pop hit [or something] with Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well, but who am I to judge?), which somehow retcons my taste for Soul Coughing into a guilty pleasure. Sometimes when they come on in my car while other people are in it, I feel bad for them.

But I always turn this song up. This is the ultimate Los Angeles song, there is none better. When you're up on a late night somewhere within Los Angeles, and I mean actually in the city, and it's five in the morning, this is what it feels like. It's tired, repetitive, but it's also frantic and wonderful, you feel like you are everywhere anyone would want to be, but everyone is already there, or they've already left, but you're alone. You almost feel like a king, briefly, but it wanes. Then you're just alone there in the car, and either there's someone on the radio talking about something, or there's this song shouting at you, and even if you're with other people you're alone because at five a.m. no one is really there anymore.

I was actually in Los Angeles at 5:00 AM once and this song came on.

I'm pretty sure I was driving home from this girl's 4k/mo apartment off of Hollywood, which is pretty Los Angeles of me, if you ask me. That girl was a total bitch, which was pretty Los Angeles of her as well. I'm pretty sure it was about a month or two later that she invited (booty-called?) me over, just to tell me that my hair was too long and that she wouldn't fuck me with long hair. I drove 40 goddamn minutes to Encino, just to turn around and drive it back.

Bitches.

Amazon Note: Unfortunately AmazonMP3 does not seem to offer anything but live Soul Coughing bootlegs. Thusly, I link to their Best Of on AmazonPhysicalMedia.