Winamp Wednesday: Such a Price to Pay
It's got the best of me...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Abra Moore, “Four Leaf Clover”
It’s all just a little too much.
What do we really value in the art around us? Is it ingenuity, novelty, a sense of cleverness that makes us all feel a little bit smart? What raises an artist out of obscurity, and—honestly more importantly to me—what puts them back there?
Abra Moore appeared out of a seeming nowhere in Summer ‘97 with “Four Leaf Clover”, this building binding swirling ode to latching onto love as an alternative to tanking your whole life. It was at once innocent and wholly world-weary in a way that feels entirely endemic to 1997. As an opening statement it was a valediction, so it’s both a mystery and obvious why she never had another hit. She was here, we were entranced, and then she was gone with the wind, off to fight battles with her record label and be mentioned in retrospectives with one-slam wonders like Jimmy Ray or Imani Coppola.
This song is twenty-six years past its heyday, and I am embarrassed that it is only now that I find out that Abra Moore was once a member of Poi Dog Pondering. (Expect them in a future WBL post, especially given the way Natural Thing had an outsize presence for me in 1999, the best year ever for music.) Hell, she was in Richard Linklater’s Slacker. She was a decade and two solo albums into a career when she became an overnight success. Nobody says which night it’s going to be.
It’s easy to see why this song had a quick hold on adolescent and young adult hearts that summer. Natural snares hit up against electronic beats in a crash of the old and the new, showing up like a herald of the future that we were all seeking out. Millennial anxiety had already begun to flare up out of the don’t-care emotional laissez-faire of the Post-Grunge landscape. It was becoming increasingly clear that history hadn’t ended, that Francis Fukuyama was full of shit, and that nobody had any idea what was going on. We weren’t going to live in our parents’ world, but what kind of tech-bourne weirdness would be our future?
“Four Leaf Clover” is a perfect example of this anxious micro-genre that sparked in the late-90s. We all seemed to adore deep weird feelings that crashed against the shores of strange in-studio trickery and skilled anonymous studio musicians. (See also Merrill Bainbridge’s “Mouth”, Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”, the entire Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Scream soundtracks.) The clash between the snick-snack drums and guitar harmonics makes me amazed I never drew the connection to Poi Dog before, and it’s that sound that made this track a hit. Abra Moore and her band seem to have understood the assignment when playing the song live; their superlative Lilith Fair performance ramps up the drums to create a stellar groove.
Both the studio and live versions rush toward the same strengths. The sound keeps building and building until you feel like Moore is attempting to force her vocals up to the top. Each “YEAH!” in the final chorus feels like a call towards abandon, the total joy that makes us unafraid of the future. If you were thirteen that summer and the world felt like a wrapped gift then you could ask for no better background music. The best and the worst days are still to come, both locally and globally. Ahead of you are the heartbreaks and disappointments of adolescence and adulthood, the screaming terror of the 21st Century. Somehow it will really never get better on Earth than it is right now. But you don’t know that yet. Right now you listen to a killer guitar solo bracketed by someone who sings “I’m all right” and means it. Right now all you hear is that you need a little luck.
Luck is a superpower. It gets more difficult to conjure as you get older. You gotta work for it. Sometimes you hear a certain song and that gumption you had comes rushing back.
“Four Leaf Clover” ran up to Number One on the charts that summer. Then the same old story played out: finished album rejected by the label, languishing in obscurity, a belated follow-up that got critical notices but no sales. While researching for this month’s Winamp Wednesdays I found that Abra Moore is still making music, this time with Poi Dog side project Soft Explosion. Things come full circle. Alanis and Garbage toured together to incredible results, Fiona Apple was lauded for Fetch the Bolt Cutters, the hitmakers of 1997 live again in the new millennium. We are still here and we want to celebrate those who got us there. Does Abra Moore get that same appraisal? Does Strangest Places live on with a popular resurrection?
Maybe all the world needed from this one song was a sense that we were all right and it was all going to be all right. The lyrics reflect a dangerous lack of self-preservation but we only needed to mine the joy from it. It was a finite resource that brought one person into the limelight and unfortunately thrust them from it when the joy was all dried up. But for me it never really left. For years I’ve been queuing “Four Leaf Clover” up when I need to start something big: a new project, a new story, anything where I’m diving deep. (Find the phrase “in the Strangest Places” in all my long-form work in tribute to the album!) It is here where joy and inspiration is a limitless resource. Maybe it’s a useless totem, a reminder of a teenage past where everything felt inspired and genius. But if it works then it works. It’s gotta bring a little luck…
Next Wednesday: superstitions, gods, cable guys, and being downhearted ever since the day we met.