one_hit_wonder raze you sit in a booth at a restaurant where for twenty years they'll ask if you've been here before. you'll say yes every time. they'll show you where the bathrooms are. you'll tell them you already know. it won't matter how many times you walk through the door. no one will remember you. maybe you don't exist. maybe they're talking to someone else. a song that was everywhere the summer you turned thirteen comes on the radio, two years past its best-by date and already ancient from overexposure. you've heard it before, but you've never really paid attention to it. this time you listen. you feel it bite into you. that man plays piano like your father does. that's something he would do. he never touches the black keys. he isn't really playing. he's walking. and when the untrained fingers he's made of his feet lose their way and he trips over his own heart, the most beautiful things fall out. somehow you get it in your head that the person singing is carroll o'connor's son. the one who killed himself when you were eleven and he was thirty-two. that man's name was hugh. this man's name is chris. but you don't know that. and the story you've built out of missing context and bad guesswork makes everything hit harder than it would if you were sure the voice you were hearing didn't belong to a dead man. you buy the cd so you can hear him sing to you anytime you want. maybe what you read on the internet is true. maybe nothing else on the album is worth owning. but these five minutes and thirty-nine seconds of major key existential blues won't leave you alone. "and if i die before i learn to speak, can money pay for all the days i lived awake but half asleep?" there's something there. now wake up. 220303 what's it to you? who go blather from