Songtown - Vol. 4 (Once A Day)

Artist - The Triffids
Song - Once A Day
Album - In The Pines
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So, I spent two years working at a record store. During my tenure, I took home at least a thousand promotional copies of new CD releases. At first, it was mainly stuff that I had been anticipating or had least been told to look into. It wasn't long until I started taking anything home that featured letters from any of my favorite alphabets. I'd drop it into iTunes immediately and figured the good stuff would find its way to the top eventually.

Then came the day that they finally issued reissues of two of the The Triffids albums. Except that I had no clue who The Triffids were and frankly, still don't. I've never listened to the two albums in their entirety and I've come to enjoy a couple of the songs that have popped up on the iPod while in Shuffle mode.

I think was a sticker on one of the cases that said they were an influential band from 1980s New Zealand or something. That's the extent of what I know about them. And at this point, a year later, I'd like to keep it that way. After I finally heard "Once A Day," I convinced myself that this was their only song.

The song seems like its obviously a cover song, but I've never heard the original. Although I love the song, I've decided to not research its origins. I think its a much more romantic idea just to imagine that it was a bunch of kids (I also like to pretend that they were and still are in seventh grade) from New Zealand that had written it. I dream that one of their dads worked as a janitor at the local watering hole and that he somehow convinced the owner to allow his boy's band to play a Sunday night gig for the regulars. The owner's one stipulation was that his daughter Pagoda had to sit in on the violin. [And she nailed it!]

With my previous false reality established that this was their first and only song, my story continues that this song comprised the entire set. [The story is foggy from there, but its possible that they might have played this one multiple times.] The crowd gives them some ironic applause, hoots and hollers ("Look at these kids trying to sing about heartache!") as the song starts up. But upon the arrival of the first chorus when the rest of the band starts belting out the response to the janitor son's call, you can really start feeling the irony turn into pure adoration, and by the final chorus, you'll hear the entire pub screaming that response.

My favorite part is in the third verse (nearly a carbon copy of verse two) when Janiboy switches out "I'm so glad I'm not like a friend I knew one time" with "I'm so glad I'm not like this wino I knew one time." What does a 13 year old know about winos??!? It doesn't matter. This boy's got himself a broken heart.

Pagoda!