This is part of a new series where I thumb through my music collection and write 500 words or less about a song I love. I’m organizing them around a theme. This first collection will be The Outliers. What’s the hook? It means other than this song, I’m either: oblivious to the rest of the respective artist’s discography, or actively hostile.

Artist: Blur

Song: “Sweet Song”

Album: Think Tank

Year: 2003

Length: 4:01

In the 90s, you had to choose: Oasis or Blur.

Real heads knew the correct answer was, of course, Pulp.

But seriously. It was the lunkheaded jocks (Oasis) versus the brainy dorks (Blur). Against type, I always preferred Oasis. To paraphrase Lester Bangs (the version portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous, at least), Damon Albarn was a drunken buffoon posing as a poet—the Gallagher brothers had the courage to be drunken buffoons, which made them poetic.

I listened to all the major Blur albums when they came out. I gave them a chance. My brother was into them. Friends tried to convince me of their greatness (going so far as to compare their album 13 to Radiohead’s OK Computer), all to no avail. Maybe it was the overwhelming Britishness of it all? My anglophilia has a limited range—I don’t like Monty Python or Mike Leigh films either.

Whatever it was, none of their songs ever connected. With two major exceptions: “No Distance Left to Run” (from the aforementioned 13)—which I’m into for its lonely, circling-the-drain hopelessness—and the aptly titled “Sweet Song" from their 2003 album Think Tank, cover art by Banksy (listen closely and you can still hear Liam Gallagher scoffing).

Sweet Song by Blur on TIDAL

Listen to Sweet Song on TIDAL

The best part of “Sweet Song” might be the first three seconds: a few melancholy piano notes that sound like the end of a song, rather than the beginning of one. It summons a wintry world. The sonic palette—tinkly piano, nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, shakers, low-fi beats—makes you feel like you’re standing in a snow globe. Time has frozen still. The tumult is over, now all that’s left to do is watch the plastic flakes fall.

In interviews and such, lead singer Damon Albarn has always struck me as a bit of a wanker, to borrow a phrase. But his vocal performance here is plaintive and vulnerable. The song derives a lot of its power from the contrast between the chords—which slowly drift down the piano alternating between majors and minors—and the rise of Albarn’s yearning falsetto.

The choir of ghostly voices that appears after the first verse (also a feature of “No Distance Left to Run”) adds an unnerving layer that gently frightens the song away from ever getting too cloying or sentimental. Likewise, the wailing guitar that screeches over the outro makes me think someone maybe listened to “Karma Police” just before entering the recording studio.

If nothing else, casually singing “Everyone is dying…” in a song called “Sweet Song” is an achievement all its own.

Should I give Blur a second chance? Let me know the deep cuts in the comments below.