Remember that part in The Wrestler when Randy the Ram is discussing music and concludes that the “nineties sucked” because that Cobain kid had to come and ruin it all? He kind of had a point.

Unlike the titular grappler, I wasn’t pining for lost hair metal anthems. Instead, I was disheartened with the way Nirvana’s astounding success suddenly, briefly turned “alternative rock” into a widespread radio format. The artists that made college radio so exciting through the eighties and into the early nineties were either in decline or had checked out altogether, making it all the easier from commercial radio programmers to overlook the diversity of sound that was the cornerstone of left-of-the-dial programming–where the sloppy guitar grind of The Replacements could happily coexist with the precise electronic yearning of New Order–and just find as many bands that fit the template for chart conquest forged by Nirvana and then perfected, miserably so, by Pearl Jam.

Around this time, I was working for a commercial radio station, a “new rock alternative” station housed in what appeared to be an abandoned suburban bank building in the middle of a vacant, dying farm field. While the occasional innovator would slip into the playlist–Beck, stand up and wave to the nice people!–the majority of the time, I was stuck playing songs that merged into a long, toxic hum. Eventually, it was like listening to on over-amplified speaker. An insistent buzzing undercurrent to the music trumped songcraft when it came to deciding on new additions to the music library.

So I hunted and hunted for music that sounded different. I wanted cleverness, inspiration, hooks and melodies, joy and wit. I wanted everything that was hard to find in the murk of the radio playlists that awaited me when I got the station. I wanted the the opposite of Bush and Tonic and Silverchair and Collective Soul and Candlebox and…good lord, I need to stop that list.

In other words, I wanted a song like this one.

Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, “I Will Wait”

(Disclaimer: The album this comes from, as best as I can tell, is out of print. That means I post this song with the understanding that it is otherwise unavailable through any means that would involve the exchange of currency between a consumer and the performers. They do have other albums available. If someone with due authority to do so instructs me to remove this from the Interweb, I will. And I’ll only sulk a little bit about it.)