I’d been away from radio for several years in the summer of 2001 when I finally found myself back in the midst of a faction of the broadcast spectrum that I hadn’t experienced in nearly a decade. I was part of radio, this time as an advisor rather than a student. Still, I was right there in the heart of the station, my original office located directly across from the main booth. After a lengthy stretch of having to engage in hefty outside scholarship to stay connected to the music that I most enjoyed, it was now all around me again, and my research sometimes required little more than walking ten feet, leaning in a doorway and asking “What did you just play?”

But I also became reacquainted with one of my favorite tools from my own student days since the radio station was, of course, a reporting subscriber to CMJ New Music Report. It wasn’t as pleasingly low-rent as the version that hit our mailbox up in Stevens Point back in the day, when the publication was a thick stack of pages held together by just a single staple in the upper left hand corner, but it still wrote about the music that stirred my interest in a direct, enthusiastic manner that matched my sensibilities perfectly. It was a little tough to watch the “15 Years Ago” sidebar chart was inch cruelly close to the music of my own era. Otherwise, going through the magazine every week was a pleasurable mix of nostalgia and discovery.

And there’s a slew of music scattered about my collection like chocolate chips dispersed generously within a cookie. The song “Standing By” by the Actual Tigers fits that description. As I recall, CMJ compared the band’s sound to that of Paul Simon, a compliment I was relatively unaccustomed to in the realm of edgy college rock (at least until Vampire Weekend came along several years later and seemingly cemented Simon in the pantheon of worthy influences). There was particular emphasis on the lead single from the band’s album Gravelled & Green so that’s what I sought out. As promised, it was pretty great–bright and smart and infectious.

Weirdly enough, this was also one of the first songs that triggered my awareness of a significant shift in the ways in which bands from the left side of the dial and the commercial world were going to intersect. “Standing By” was a fairly obscure song. While I enjoyed it, I don’t remember it getting much traction at our station or on college radio in general. Yet, there it was a few years later, dropped into the trailer of a major studio movie. Hearing a song like that in a commercial or a trailer was enough of a rarity in the late eighties and early nineties that it always startled me when it happened. This had less to do with collective angst about selling out (articulated musically by Neil Young) and more with the simple fact that marketers didn’t seem to be paying the slightest attention to our bands. Now the indier-than-thou band catalogs being mined to take the place of jingles in commonplace enough to serve as the premise for truly inspired comedy bits. It’s hard to remember there was a time I had trouble finding excellent new music when all I have to now is listen closely to the newest iPhone ad.

The Actual Tigers, “Standing By”

(Disclaimer: It sure looks to me like the Gravelled & Green album is out of print. However, when you search “actual tigers” on Amazon, you do find other items available for purchase, so that’s a route you can go. The song is posted her under the belief that it’s not easily available for purchase in a means that will provide due compensation to both the artist and the proprietor of a local, independently-owned record store. Should anyone contact me to correct this supposition or ask me to take it down for any reason, I will gladly and promptly comply.)