Day 01 - Your Favorite Song

This entry a part of the 30 Day Song Challenge

* * *

Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand
Primitive Radio Gods
Rocket
(Released June 1996) 

The challenge for Day 1 is “your favorite song” but I’m not sure if it means my favorite song of the moment or my favorite song ever. (Actually, I don’t reckon “favorites” are forever as our tastes change, but anyway…) Right now, my favorite song is Haley Reinhart’s Bennie and the Jets American Idol studio recording. I’ve been playing it nonstop since she performed it and I sing along to it (with feeling!) when no one is looking. I’m not sure how long it’s going to be my earworm. I like the song because of the beat; other than that it doesn’t have any major significance to me. It’s just a feel-good tune waiting to be replaced by another feel-good tune.

However, if it’s my personal anthem we’re talking about, then, without question, it’s got to be Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand by the Primitive Radio Gods. It’s where I got my two email usernames (swimlikelions and zebraflesh).

I have a playlist entitled “I Love This Song!” of which this tune is a part. But lately I’ve found that I would skip the track whenever it comes on. It’s such a serious song that whenever I listen to it I can’t help but think about heavy things (i.e., the past, present, and future). So yeah, I would rather skip it than have to subject myself to emo-ness. I’ve got enough emotional baggage as it is. Anyway.

But that doesn’t in any way diminish the beauty of this song, this one-hit wonder. People best remember it as the song that rocked the summer of 1996 (in the US) but it was not until September or October when it made it to the Asian charts (at least on Channel V). I know because I stayed up late every Sunday night in hopes of catching the video of Los Del Rio’s Macarena. I didn’t really care for this Primitive Radio Gods song until I heard it again, four years later, on the now-defunct The Hive 100.3. Then, I chanced upon the song on the bootleg compilation Contagion 5. A year later I bought the cassette tape at the local record store.

I can understand why it’s the only Primitive Radio Gods song that made waves. Quite frankly, the album was pretty bad. I remember reading a review back then that if you expected the rest of the record to sound like Phone Booth then you were in for a treat. Quite true — the other tracks had nothing to do with this song; it was as if Phone Booth was independently conceived of and just mixed in with a bunch of other cuts. Although I do like another Primitive Radio Gods song, Fading Out, but it’s from the sophomore album, White Hot Peach.

Anyway, I love everything about Phone Booth: BB King’srepetitious I’ve been downhearted baby, the bells, the airplane, the clumsy piano playing, the oohs and doodoos, the words, the whole mood of the song. This song takes my breath away every time I listen to it but it’s one of those deep songs that you have to analyze to get what the artist wants to convey. Yet it’s also one of those deep songs where your interpretation is as good as anyone else’s.

What really intrigues me is the long title. Before, I dismissed it as simply random but SongMeanings.net has allowed me to explore how other fans have made it out. I think the following interpretation makes the most sense to me:

You can be prepared but you can’t change what life will throw at you. You can have a pocketful of change but that doesn’t mean the phonebooth works. 

* * *