As I’ve previously confessed, I came to my musical taste relatively late. I’d love to report that I was precociously listening to cool Joy Division music or bouncy, catchy Ramones songs when I was a kid, but during the era those albums were coming out, I was still childishly clinging to lesser fare. It certainly didn’t help that the only adult in my immediate household who even bothered to listen to music was drawn to highly problematic choices, making it that much harder for me to find a pathway to the excellent material that was emerging in the part of the music scene that were a little more hidden to a withdrawn kid in the Midwest.

When I finally wrestled my way out, thanks largely to a dangerous and unholy cocktail of Rolling Stone and MTV, I greedily sought out anything that was even a little different, anything that most radio programmers were instinctively dismissive of, and especially anything that was easy enough for me to grasp that I could get a handle on the inspiration and themes of the song. I’ve always been fairly impatient about my music knowledge. I’ve never learned an instrument because I’m filled with withering dread at the thought of working on scales or practicing chords rather than just picking up a guitar and being able to immediately play the Billy Bragg song of my choosing. So when I connect with a new band–especially when I connected with a new band back then–I want to know everything about them as quickly as possible. This was much harder twenty-plus years ago, when limitless reference material wasn’t just a couple handy mouse clicks away.

I’m not sure where I heard the explanation behind the song “Small Circles” by The Rainmakers. It might have been from an MTV VJ. It might have been from one of the DJs on WMAD-FM, the one station in town that allow for a playlist with some daring offerings sprinkled in. As I recall the story was this: one of the songwriters for the band had heard about some birds with a mating ritual that concluded with the two parties slowly circling around one another. The circles gradually got larger and larger, eventually expanding to the point that the birds drifted away from each other completely. This reasonably seemed like a pretty good metaphor for human relationships, and, therefore, became the basis for a song. Since I had a relatively meager collection of music knowledge at the time, I probably shared this little nugget of information with others a tiresome amount.

Which, I suppose, makes it only fitting that I share it again now.

The Rainmakers, “Small Circles”

(Disclaimer: To the best of my determination, the entirety of The Rainmakers catalog seems to be out of print. Well, the entirety of their older catalog, anyway. Like a lot of bands of that era, they seem to have dug out some older stuff and released it, which does lead me to believe that there might be some other self-released comp out there that at least contains a version of this song. But I’m too lazy to dig that deep. I will note that if anyone with due authority to do so asks me to remove this track from my humble corner of the Interweb, I will gladly do so. Incidentally, the existence of this particular MP3 is not my handiwork. Someone else uploaded it, and I got it that way. I’d be happy to give due credit, but where I got it from initially is a mystery.)