Michigan Girls
Califone • Quicksand / Cradlesnakes
I’ve been a big fan of Califone ever since I first stumbled upon them many moons ago. It was mostly by chance, something in the Rolling Stone review of Quicksand / Cradlesnakes that I was skimming over jumped out at me as something that I might like. Or that I should at least remember to check out (it was mostly the name of the track ‘When Leon Spinx Moved Into Town’ that grabbed my attention and made me want to give it a listen). So I locked it in the memory bank, and went on my way.
This was waaaay back in 2003. I was just starting to realize that you could use the internet for more than sending emails. You could also download lots of music. And porn. For free. I didn’t have my own computer, but I lived at a house where my friend did. And it was through that computer that I could finally start to hear all these bands that I was otherwise only able to read about (usually you would have wait for them to finally ‘break’ or ‘make it big’, about 7 years after all the cool kids were already tired of them).
So among many, many other things that i downloaded (somethings unmentionable), I downloaded a few Califone songs on my friends computer (eventually his computer would pick up more viruses than a third world prostitute and die a slow death). I grabbed the aforementioned ‘When Leon Sphinx Moved to Town’ (which Rolling Stone had correctly described as very cool) and a song called Michigan Girls. Although I had just wanted to try out the Leon Sphinx tune, something about Michigan Girls persuaded me to give it a go too (I tend to like songs about girls, and figured Michigan Girls were probably a lot like Canadian girls, so I was intrigued).
Anyways, long story short, ‘Michigan Girls’ is one of my favourite songs ever. And because of this, Quicksand / Cradlesongs is one of my favourite albums of all time and I’ve been lucky enough to have been a fan of Califone since their earlier years (I may not have been on board fright rom the very start, but at least I wasn’t 7 years behind, which was too often the case back in those early internet days).
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