Tuesday November 21st - Evening

Day 152, Session 53:
Location: At the end of the train.
First song: Come Monday by Jimmy Buffett
Last full song: Comfort and Joy by Simon and Garfunkel
Progress: 659-668 of 4446
Total Songs Heard: 616

Oops. Miscounted last time and totally missed the fact that 600 songs had been passed. Song 600 was Colleen Campbell, another in the long and impressive line of Fruvous fan songs.

Jimmy Buffett is an interesting case. The wife and I went with some friends to a Buffett concert at Wrigley 2 summers ago. It was a crazy day. Ten of thousands of people drunk off their asses for the better part of a day. Everyone wearing Hawaiian shirts. People singing along to every song. It was everything that's great about Buffett (community spirit, enthusiastic crowd, fun songs) and everything not as great about Buffett (too many amateurs drinking, hard to hear music over crowd, songs that all kind of start to sound the same) all rolled into one. Then I heard this story from Slate.com and I came to appreciate the whole Buffett phenomenon a little better.

That's what makes Come Monday such a strange case. It's not another song about some sort of tropical fantasy. It's a simple ballad about a guy who misses his woman during weekends away doing shows. Back when I used to make mix tapes this song ended up on one I listened to a lot after college when driving back and forth the 2 hours between Dayton and where The Wife was living at the time. We saw each other some weekends and then spent weeks apart. It was a strange time in the relationship, often we weren't sure exactly when we'd see each other next, but we made it through. Whenever I heard the song during one of those lonely rides home I would replace the word Monday with "some indeterminate weekend that hopefully will be sooner rather than later." It really didn't fit very well into the rhythm of the song.

It's not my favorite Buffett song, but it's up there. Of course when he performed it at the show, I sang (the right words) drunkenly along with the rest of the Parrotheads... as the wife elbowed me for singing too loud at a concert.