Internship, Oil, Tears, and Headhunters

Been working my buns off the past few months on the internship applications that I've mentioned here before. I have 11 down and 3 to go, and those 3 shouldn't be too tough. I'm turning the corner.

The internship applicaiton process has meant that Teo has been away from the Hombres more often than not. Sorry, boys.

So here's a string of consciousness for you.

A few months ago I went into get an oil change on my 2005 Saturn Ion. It was a good car, but not great, and I liked the idea of it more than I actually liked it. So I drop off the car and there's a sign there that said, "We need your Saturn! Talk to a sales representative." So I did. And instead of driving away with the newly-oil-changed car, I drove away with a 2002 Saturn SL2. It had 30,000 miles on it, which was great for being a 2002, and I like the SL2 better than the Ion. This is not an interesting car. It's a car. If you Wikipedia "car", it has an SL2 as an example. (Well, it probably doesn't, and I'm not going to look, but you get the point.)

So even though the SL2 is older and a step down from the Ion, it has two things that are better than the Ion: 1) gas mileage (which has no bearing on this story), and 2) a better sound system. Yes, I am the only person in history who will tell you that the 2002 Saturn SL2 sound system is actually quite excellent. Mock if you like, but you can bounce in that thing.

SO. This is where we go tangential a bit. (A bit? Only now?)

I've been listening to a record that sounds freakin great and it is the kind of record that my pals Pinata and Vinnissimo would want to hear about. And essentially, that's what Tres Hombres is for.

Tears for Fears: Elemental. 1992, I believe. This is a great album. Great. It's only the one dude with the big mouth and mullet hair (Roland!), and the other guy is MIA. But that's OK. I discovered this album when I got the record for free because they were on Mercury Records and I worked on that floor in NYC in '92. I had a cubicle outside of the VP of Video, and all the Mercury artists would come by for meetings. (The list as I remember it: Roland, Gene and Paul from Kiss, Mellencamp, Vanessa Williams, Jon Bon Jovi, Black Sheep, and yes, the Kentucky Headhunters.)

Which all is to say that Roland and TFF were Mercury artists, so I got the disc for free. I remember liking the record, which was actually pretty rare. I got so many CDs for free I didn't take many of them seriously. But that record stood out as pretty good. I'd pull it out every couple years.

Here's the other thing about that record and that band: They always had to fight the 80s stereotype of pablum pop. They never were that, but they had to fight it because of when they were putting out their records. They always had really, really good records, but they had to fight the pop backlash both when they were in it and then again when Nirvana took over the world. TFF never had a chance to be taken seriously.

So here's my stand. Roland is a great songwriter, and yes, I've italicized great three, no, four times in this post. The production is great. That album is as good of an album as I can name at this moment. It's interesting from start to finish and the sound is pristine. It also has great examples of that rare record to successfully mix programmed drums with real drums, and there are only a few people who can do that. This record is brilliant.

And it sounds great in a 2002 Saturn. So you both have two jobs to do this weekend:

1) Go buy a used Saturn, and
2) Go buy Tears for Fears "Elemental" from 1992 and play it in your new/old car

You will like.