"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.
We all have one-hit wonders that we love. The one song that came out of nowhere, by a band we never heard of before or since, but is just perfect in its way.
(The band itself almost always hates that idea - they were around before and after, and spent long hours getting to the point of that one great song. But attention is fickle and most bands get at best one shot.)
One of mine is the Monroes, and the song is 1982's What Do All The People Know.
Could you be the one I'm thinkin' of?
Could you be the girl I really love?
All the people tell me so
But what do all the people know?
It's a bit New Wave-y in its sound and bounce - maybe a bit more of its time forty years later than we thought it was then.
I love the way it can be both straightforward and subtle, all framed as this one conversation the speaker is having with his girlfriend. Everything should be great, but...somehow, for reasons he doesn't quite say, it must not be. It's one of the great songs of that gap, between what Is and what Should Be.
And the title is just perfect, almost a Zen koan, the ideal response to something we've all heard a million times - maybe it wasn't the first time anyone said it, but it's the iconic version.
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