Brandon's Buzz

Train — “Respect (Everybody Needs a Little)”
(from Drops of Jupiter) —

Nine years ago today, Sherry Ann and I found ourselves in, of all places, Shreveport, Louisiana, where we had journeyed to do a bit of gambling, share a little best friend time, and take in a concert. See, that season, she was mad about Matchbox 20, and I was all atwitter over Train (who had just beaten the sophomore jinx big time with their staggeringly ferocious second album), and miraculously, they were co-headlining a tour in the summer of 2001, and Shreveport was as close to us as the they were gonna stop. So we drove up there on the 10th and had an utterly amazing trip: we made fantastic time, we listened to a passel of fabulous music, and we painlessly found both our hotel and the concert site (which, crazy enough, were within one half-mile of each other). The day was so great that I was powerless to fight the increasingly nagging fear that it was all too good to be true.

The next morning, I woke up early and flipped on the television just in time to catch the second airplane plowing into the South Tower, and even though it didn’t quite dawn on us how serious a situation this was until later in the afternoon (when, while trying to get some CD shopping done, we discovered that the Mall of Shreveport — Sears excepted — was closed), when I called the arena to check the status of the concert, I was crushed to hear a recording calmly explaining that the show would be postponed.

I still have yet to see Train live, and in its own crazy way, that fact has probably exacerbated the mythic quality that their music has taken on inside my deranged brain. I’ve listened to this tune (and its album) probably two hundred times in the past decade — and sung along at full blast most of those times — and I’m still not tired of it. You may not win the respect you and your work so richly deserve from the high-falutin’ critics, Pat, but you decidedly and forever win mine, sir.