The Smithereens\u2019 Especially For You<\/i> was released March 1, 1986. I was a senior in high school, a misfit at a small Catholic college prep school in north-central Illinois.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t tell you when or why I actually bought the CD. I assume at some point I heard \u201cBehind The Wall Of Sleep\u201d \u2013 either on MTV at my grandparents\u2019 or on WBNQ out of Bloomington, IL (which we could only get in sometimes). Gods know where I tracked it down in the pre-Amazon era.<\/p>\n
I was not a three-chord garage rock fan; anyone who remembers my writing from the early days of the DV knows that my music tastes run more towards Alan Parsons and Duncan Sheik. But there was something about Pat DiNizio\u2019s voice \u2013 haunting, rich, and sad \u2013 that drew me in where Michael Stipe and Paul Westerberg had failed.<\/p>\n
Pat DiNizio died yesterday, suddenly, at the age of 62.<\/p>\n
I turn 50 this February. A lot of my personal musical icons are starting to die. David Bowie is gone. Eric Woolfson of the Alan Parsons Project died in 2009. And I have to acknowledge that the older I get, the more deaths I\u2019m going to face. <\/p>\n
For some reason, though, DiNizio\u2019s death has affected me deeply. Maybe it\u2019s because he could emote incredibly well; when he sang a sad song, you felt the tragedy behind it \u2013 and that has reminded me of the tragedies we go through every day of losing people we love. \u201cBlood And Roses\u201d, from Especially For You<\/i>, is a gut-twisting three and a half minutes of breakup, and \u201cBehind The Wall Of Sleep\u201d is a frightening look into a stalker fan\u2019s mind. \u201cCigarette\u201d is a frozen snapshot of the moment before the end. \u201cIn A Lonely Place\u201d is a bitter duet of loss. Never once do the Smithereens go into excess or bombast; they remain on Especially For You<\/i> tight, clean, and masters of elegant songwriting. And when you consider this was their debut full-length CD, well\u2026 I consider them to be one of the great underappreciated American rock bands, and DiNizio one of the most expressive rock vocalists of the last thirty years.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m afraid, with Pat DiNizio and The Smithereens, we don\u2019t know what we had\u2026and as time continues its inexorable march, we will lose more artists that have received too little credit, too little appreciation, and too little acclaim. Especially For You<\/i> was the beginning of an outstanding career, and is definitely worth checking out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":27462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7330],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-45166","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-smithereens","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45166"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}