"Stockton Gala Days" by 10,000 Maniacs

I was introduced to 10,000 Maniacs by my pal Alvin. The weird thing is, I’ve become more fanatical about the band than him.
Having your first 10KM record is an unforgettable experience. First, you’re intrigued by the cover art, some obscure artifact of Americana, a reminder of a bygone time so familiar yet so strange. Then you open the sleeve and as you read it, you realize that these aren’t just words for songs. It’s literature. Genuine works of art in the form of words, assembled in concise, perfectly constructed paragraphs. The words as written by Natalie Merchant can open your imagination and take you to another place. “Stockton Gala Days” is the most vivid example: the lyrics are very specific , pegging the setting somewhere in the American heartland, yet the longing uncannily describes and sums up a youthful experience that is universal, full of escapades and flings, a time when promises mean a lot more than deeds.
Aside from the lyrical perfection, musically it is also quite remarkable. Beginning with an eerie, shaky ramble then slips into a serene, jangly verse, while the choppy, hesitant drums in the chorus gives it a cool touch, before that rumble comes again for the middle eight when Merchant sings “You’ll never know…” (For the unplugged version, the Maniacs retooled it so that the song became a folk instrument extravaganza : banjos, fiddles, the whole lot. Arguably it’s superior to the recorded album version )
Corn fields, blue streams, foxglove stalks, blossoms, images like that of pilgrims in an uncorrupted America, where the lust is not political or financial, but kept to the innocent desires of youth.