Since I’ve committed to only posting out-of-print music for this humble weekly feature, there’s a very good chance that I’ll be continually hearkening back to my college radio days. I find it less likely that this will become an exercise in CMJ nostalgia, but that seems a surprisingly fertile area for me this week.

The weekly trade journal used to be the sole source for reading about the music that was likely to cross our desks and turntables (and eventually CD players) at the radio station. There was no Pitchfork, there was no collection of ultra-hip blogs. All we had were a few music magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin and Musician that were unlikely to delve deep enough in their review sections to cover the more obscure new music (in part because they committed valuable column inches genuflecting before the established likes of Neil Young). So CMJ was the one publication likely to take note of just about every album that arrived in our mailbox.

At the time, CMJ‘s record reviews were clearly targeted at the college broadcaster, often ending with a dry listing of two or three songs that were worth exploring for airplay. When Harm Farm’s second album came out, I was prepared to completely ignore it, completely worn down by the novelty hit, “Clams,” from their prior effort. It didn’t help that the first single was “Crawdads,” a blatant attempt to duplicate that earlier minor success. But I dutifully read the CMJ review, making note of the songs that noted as particularly strong and when my turn on the air came, I went ahead and played one of them.

At 90FM, we used to keep slips of paper in the CDs so DJs could mark down the song they played with the corresponding date. Years later, if you could find the station’s copy of this release (probably relegated to basement storage with all the other unloved, misfit CDs) and open it up, you’d probably still find a slip with my crooked handwriting spelling out “Daisy, I…” with the sort of frequency usually reserved for true college radio staples like “Can’t Get Here From There” or “Kool Thing”.

Maybe it’s the fiddle that does it for me…

Harm Farm, “Daisy, I…”

(Disclaimer: This song is offered because I believe it to be out of print and entirely unavailable through any means that would put money into the respective bank accounts of the band members. If you tried to buy the CD used through Amazon, prices apparently start at a penny, so no one’s making millions off of this anyway. That’s the same price it costs to purchase an MP3 of “Clams,” their one song that generated any significant college radio airplay. Despite all this, if someone with the authority to do so asks me to remove this from the blogosphere, I’ll gladly comply.)