As first promised eighteen months ago, the band that provided the soundtrack to my college years, The Badlees, have come out of semi-retirement and obscurity to release a new record.

Next month, we’ll find out why, exactly, Love is Rain.

Preceding the release is a new tune, “Radio at Night”, streaming through that tedious myspace embedded player business. However, it’s definitely worth your time to venture over to that blinky eyesore of the internet, because the tune is REALLY GOOD.

Like a lot of the band’s best, it’s more than a little nakedly autobiographical; Looking back on the “good old days” and recalling them fondly, though with the acknowledgement that life’s moved on. Change is life, and that’s okay. A little distance and perspective, however, can, perhaps, heal old rifts and re-create lapsed connections in a new way, building on shared experience*. It’s “Like a Rembrandt”, a little older and wiser; “Na Na”, only we don’t quite end up ‘back where we came from’, but we can see how where we came from led us here:

tonight we’re singing memories, reconnecting souls
there’s diamonds in that coal, life will take it’s toll
the songs of youth and summer feel so right
on the radio at night

It’s a sentiment that I think a lot of us can appreciate; and I, for one, can’t wait to see if the theme carries through the rest of the record; I can see a wealth of good songwriting in that well, and I wanna hear what these guys (great songwriters all) do with what they find there.

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* –at least that’s what I got out of it, but that’s the beauty of poetry; it’s open to interpretation, your mileage my vary. On a completely different note, musically, this tune, while sharing some characteristics with the renew sessions, has a little more of an edge; it would’ve sounded great live circa 1996.