The bedroom and your mind.

Velocity Girl - What You Left Behind

The year was 1994. A fourteen-year-old in suburban New Jersey wants the sense of superiority that comes with being an indie kid but is without indie friends, high-speed internet, or the determination to walk to New York City (alas, no driver's license). The little he knew (Sub Pop is the coolest label; they put out Bleach!) combined with his limited access to "alternative media" (Spin magazine) leads him to buy an album from Sam Goody called !Simpatico! by a band named Velocity Girl. The rest is history.

No seriously, I literally bought this album on the basis of one review in Spin coupled with the very important little logo on the back that said "SUB POP." It was the first cd I bought that no one I knew had even heard of. I had barely heard of them. What's amazing is Velocity Girl, pretty much unbeknownst to me, had a lot of the elements that would form the cornerstone of my future musical taste: noisy guitars+sweetly melodic melodies (power-pop!); hot girl singer (that is to say, a singer that sounded hot, or at least cute); and boy/girl harmonies. This song, although featuring verses sung by the not-nearly-as-hot boy singer, has all of the above, as well as a coda that sounds exactly like a toilet paper commercial: "Feel the cottony softness..."

Owning this record never really earned me any indie cred; Ryan Bailey had never heard of them--they weren't exactly Fugazi (though they were from D.C.). But it's one of my landmark records: it's the earliest record I bought that's still on my iPod.