Better Things: Blood Is Thicker Than Water

"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.

I really doubt you know what song I'm writing about here. A lot of things have been called Blood Is Thicker Than Water, and this one is, let me polite, not the biggest or best-known.

But it's a great song, from a great record, from an LA band that had at least this moment in 1992 - it was a single, it got some airplay, it made at least a small mark in the world.

This Blood Is Thicker Than Water is by Thelonious Monster - a band whose name I can never spell without checking it twice - from the Beautiful Mess record. It's a song about family, and who you are, and who you want to be. And, more than that, who you end up being despite it all.

Because blood is thicker than water
Oh yeah, blood is thicker than water
At least that's what they say, yeah that's what they say
But I don't know, yeah I don't know

The spoken intro is about the singer's sister, a "born-again Christian" who is "so far away." The first verse is about his father; so is the third. The middle verse is about found family; the friends he insists are better and more important than blood relatives.

But then the chorus comes back, of course.

I swore I'd never ever be like my dad
He smoked and drank and yelled at everyone
I swore I'd never ever be like him
But now I look in the mirror and there he is, yeah

None of us are the people we wanted to be - some of us are closer than others. We're not in the places we want to be. We might not be with the people we want to be with: friends or family or lovers or anyone. We didn't come from what we dreamed about, and didn't get there later, either.

All because blood is thicker than water - at least that's what they say.