Better Things: All Her Favorite Fruit

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

And here's where the series makes its first left-turn into the very idiosyncratic. (At least I think so: the first three songs strike me as solidly reasonable choices, big famous songs by fairly famous bands. But this is all my taste, so you may disagree.)

Camper Van Beethoven had a lot of great songs in a lot of modes - more awesome covers than most bands, with Pictures of Matchstick Men and One of These Days and Interstellar Overdrive, silly songs like Take the Skinheads Bowling and stark powerful late songs like Civil Disobedience, great instrumentals like Skinhead Stomp - but the song of theirs I come back to is a slow, loping, string-drenched monologue of longing.

It's All Her Favorite Fruit, from the 1989 record Key Lime Pie, which for a long time looked like the end of their work as a band. (It wasn't; everyone has a reunion, eventually, if there's any money at all to be had.)

The narrator is thinking about a woman - he's not named, she's not named, the "he" she's currently with isn't named, either. We don't know why they're not together, but the song is this man's vision of what their lives together could be. We don't know if she agrees. We don't know much of anything, frankly: it's all his viewpoint, this one line of thought.

I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder
I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay

The song has a languid pace that matches the vision this man has of his potential life with this woman - somewhere "in the colonies," far away from the metropolis they live in. And everything is allusive, fleeting - nothing is said clearly or concretely. There's probably danger of some kind - even in the vision of their life together there's a hint of that:

We'd play croquet behind white-washed walls and drink our tea at four
Within intervention's distance of the embassy

This is a song of mood and emotion and feeling, I can believe the whole thing takes place in this man's head as he drives home from work, as he says in the first lines. It's a song of nuance and deep emotion, which I love about it.