This is an important thread: I was driving a car that had nothing but radio last month, flipping the channels like mad, trying to find something that was at least interesting. "Hey There" came on, and I was caught, not exactly captured, but close: fascinated by the lineage of the song. It sounded, to me, like a Paul Simon re-write, but, importantly, filtered through the generation that identified with the garbage bag/rain scene in "Garden State." A sensitive, just-moved-to-New-York-to-make-it-song. A re-write of "America." An American song, then. A song of longing. A song of hope, a song of America before it broke. But it might not be more than a song that got me through a long traffic light. In any case, this song signaled to me that there will be (at least) a brief era in which the fragmentation/niche life of ipod/xm/self-programmed music will give way to a few mass-identified radio hits. Is it beginning? Don't ask me, I've been playing the first Suicide album alot lately...
