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“Candy Everybody Wants” – 10,000 Maniacs
(Words/music: Dennis Drew & Natalie Merchant, available on MTV Unplugged, Elektra 1993)
My iTunes library on my current computer goes back to July 2007. “Candy Everybody Wants” is the song that’s been played at least once (an embarrassingly large percentage of my library has a playcount of zero) that went back the furthest until moments ago when I played it. The suggestion is that I went two and a half years without listening to the song, and that’s not likely true; I may have heard it on Pandora or it may have played on my iPod on one of the times where my music didn’t sync (not to mention clicking on another song before it ended). Regardless, I haven’t heard it a lot since July 2007 and that makes me kind of sad.
The melody in “Candy Everybody Wants” suits Natalie Merchant’s voice well. Merchant’s rich tone serves it well while still giving her a few minutes to show her vocal strengths, particularly at the end of the verses. Lyrically, the song tangentially addresses the debate about content in the mass media, specifically whether the entertainment industry should be ashamed for glorifying sex and violence or whether it’s merely listening to and providing for its audience’s demands. The whole thing, the melody, the assortment of stringed instruments, and the subject are all pleasant – certainly charming and clever, but not in a particularly outstanding way. I suppose this is how I could go from July 14, 2007 to today without having heard the song; it’s the kind of song that might lose its charm when in constant rotation. While two and a half years is too long, in this case absence made my ears grow fonder.
More on 10,000 Maniacs: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
