Let’s’ start by checking some lists I put this album on:
Desert Island Pick? Check.
Don’t skip a song? Yep
Know every word? Uh-huh.
Early adopter? I’m there.
Songs that will not be skipped if they come on the radio? Don’t touch that dial.
Never stopped listening? Played it just yesterday.
I’ve known this was coming for a while. I’ve been excited because I get to write about one of my favorite albums ever! But now that I’m here, I’m stuck. I don’t know if I can explain why I love New Miserable Experience the way I do. Most things written about this record cover the history of the band and the tragic circumstances surrounding the recording and release. I’m not going to do that because none of it affects how I feel about it. Here’s what I know:
The summer of ‘92 is one of those that sticks clearly in my memory. I was supposed to be finished with college and starting either my first job or getting ready for law school. However, as I’ve said before, I had a tough time my first year and a half of school so I fell a bit behind (I like to say I was academically redshirted at UT.), and I wasn’t going to graduate until December. One of my financial aid perks was working as a work-study in the Political Science Department on campus. One of the professors took a liking to me and asked if I would also like to work as his personal assistant. Both he and his wife were blind, and I read student papers to him and drove them to appointments. She owned a house in Rochester, New York and they were planning to spend the summer there, so he asked if I would be interested in house sitting for them while they were gone. You’re asking a 22 year-old if he wants to spend the summer living for free in a very nice Knoxville neighborhood? Didn’t take long to say yes. I got a job at a video store and set up camp. Man, I had a good time. All this matters because they had a pretty sweet stereo system in that house and I spent a lot of time using it. New Miserable Experience was released at the end of that summer.
This is another of those slow burn albums that took almost a full year to find success. As was becoming more common for me, I first heard the tunes on WUTK. You can find plenty of fans of this record that will tell the same story of their local college radio station pushing these tunes. So much so that in 93, the record company re-released the album and gave the band money to reshoot the video for “Hey Jealousy”. I went and bought the album almost immediately after hearing that song for the first time. I made a cassette copy for my car and it never left.
I guess I should talk about the music. I love melodic electric guitar and that is the centerpiece of this band. I’ve talked about my love of two guitar bands ,and Jesse Venezuela and Doug Hopkins fit the bill. You know I’m a fan of lovelorn, slightly melancholy lyrics and this is full of them. What we have here is twelve melodic, slightly noisy, pop/rock tunes that I immediately fell in love with. It didn’t hurt that Robin Wilson’s voice is a bit reminiscent of John Waite (one of my favorite vocalists ever), and that nearly every song has tambourine – which I am always a sucker for. Critics call this jangle pop or power pop; generally falling under the hot-at-the-time encompassing umbrella of “alternative”.
After summer was over, I moved back on campus with two guys I was friends with my freshman year who were also graduating in December. Once I played this record for them, they fell for it as well and it became the soundtrack for our apartment (along with Madden ‘92 on Super Nintendo and the three of us throwing things during Dallas Cowboy games).
This is the (non-Prince) album I have listened to more times than any other in the last 30 years. I never get tired of it and can’t imagine I ever will. In 2017, the band did an anniversary tour where they played the album live in its entirety. I went and will admit to tearing up a couple of times.
Personally, I am connected to this album in a much more important way. The week this record was released is the same week Traci and I started dating. We lived two hours apart for the first year we dated, and when she came to visit on weekends, we listened to NME. The chorus to “Hey Jealousy” says “maybe we can drive around this town…”, and since we didn’t have much money, we did that alot. When we are on a road trip, inevitably this will get played. Just yesterday, we went out for lunch on our anniversary. On the way back home we listened to this record and sang along together. After 30 years I’m not tired of that.
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