What to Do With an Empty Glass

Song 289: This week on the playlist you can hear Let Go by From Good Homes, written by Todd Sheaffer. It’s only been 6 weeks since my last personal friend song post, so this isn’t one of those, but I almost had the chance to meet Todd Sheaffer, who wrote this song, and if I had gotten to meet him, perhaps he might have become a very good friend of mine. Back in the early '90s, Todd came to one of the Thursday night gatherings at Jack Hardy’s Houston St. apartment, and he played a couple of songs for Jack before the regular festivities got started, but then he had to leave early. I got the impression that he and Jack knew each other well, and that he may have been a more frequent guest in the era before I started making that scene. Anyway, I knew who he was, having heard him perform with his band From Good Homes at the folkie MacDougal St. club that a bunch of us singer/songwriter types frequented in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I liked quite a few of the songs on the band’s set list, but from the first time I heard it, this track moved me the most. It took a few years before it finally made it to CD, but once it did, I made sure to get a copy, and not long after, I made it the opening cut on a personal favorites CD, around the time when CD burners became an affordable home appliance. One day when I had that personal favorites CD spinning on the player, a friend remarked on how this track reminded him of Satisfaction, with the singer singing “let go” instead of “I can’t get no.” I could hear the similarity that he was pointing out, but I didn’t hear as close a connection as he did, and nothing about that similarity did anything to dampen my satisfaction with this cut, which I continued to enjoy as my 90s Faves 1 CD later gave birth to a playlist that still graces my iPod. While the track doesn’t really break any new musical or lyrical ground, it conveys such a quality of perfection, from the lead solo to the basic rocking recorded sound to the clever lyrical turns of phrase, that it feels like this is as good as it gets. I could wish that all of my recordings would sound this good, but that might be a hard dream to hold onto, and I might have to Let Go.