Paul Westerberg

I’m sorry, but I get so sick of new music sometimes. It’s not that I want to live stuck in the late ‘8os or ’90s, enveloped by the past, but I need to see where I’ve been. Not to get all Nick Hornsby here, but I want access to the personal history that comes with MY music. Case in point: Sam and I went to see The Wedding Present on Thursday night in Pontiac (where, apparently, Elvis split his pants playing at the Silverdome), and it was awesome. David Gedge has been making music since 1985, and we’ve been listening to it for almost long, and it felt so good to hear him rip through “Kennedy” and screw up the lyrics to “Crawl” and play half of the Seamonsters album and turn “I-5” into the most intense therapy session. So with this post, I wanted to tap into similar memories, like walking up the Lake Michigan bike path from Hyde Park to Grant Park to see Paul Westerberg play the 1996 Chicago TasteFest wearing a bright yellow suit. I’ll keep the rest of my stories of Westerberg and The Replacements to myself, and let you know that, 1) Paul has been recording and releasing single, studio session length MP3s recently, and 2) a bunch of Replacements albums were remastered and rereleased a week or two ago. Also, for anyone still reading, I can offer one of the best songs ever recorded in the whole history of music (“We May Be The Ones”) and a handful of other tracks kindly provided by Vagrant Records, so you start making some of your own history.


www.paulwesterberg.com
www.vagrant.com