Song 481: This week the playlist recognizes She by The Monkees, written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Growing up in a fundamentalist home, I wasn't allowed to own any LPs of the devil's music, but I had plenty of friends who did have collections, and thanks to them, I got to hear More of the Monkees quite a lot, to the point that I knew every cut on the record well enough to sing along with them all, and to sing them to myself when I was alone, nowhere close to a turntable. This opening track, which is the third MotM to appear on this list (Steppin' Stone is Song 400 and Your Auntie Grizelda is Song 448), became a quick favorite, and I remember singing it to myself a number of times while doing my afternoon job delivering newspapers to my neighbors down the road. The lyrics sounded to me at the time like an apt description of the dynamic between myself and one of my newspaper delivery customer's daughters - I concluded that she liked me hangin' 'round because she needed someone to walk on so her feet didn't touch the ground. Having that kind of connections with a certain recording, it truly surprised me to read that at some point Monkee Michael Nesmith called MotM “probably the worst album in the history of the world” because I really liked it the first time through, and I still do.
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