By American legal definition, I was barely an adult when the song “I’m an Adult Now” was released, which naturally made me the perfect target for its rapturous celebration of all things reckless and young. Well, that’s not quite true. When the song was first released in 1986, I was stick a couple years away when I could jump pell mell into all sorts of mature decisions, like voting, getting married or, scariest of all, joining the military. When its rerecorded version was released on the Love Junk album in the fall of 1988, with the attention-getting imprimatur of producer Todd Rundgren, I was freshly ensconced in a late night college radio slot and still getting used to the idea that I wasn’t a kid any longer. That lent extra comic heft to lyrics like “I don’t write songs about girls anymore/ I have to write songs about women/ No more boy meets girl boy loses girl/ More like man tries to figure out what the hell went wrong,” not that I was especially adept at meeting either girls or women at that particular juncture.

While I enjoy the song greatly and completely understand why it was chosen to the be the first single from the band’s debut album, I feel bad for the broader outcome it helped cause. Like a lot of bands that had their flash on the college radio charts, the Pursuit of Happiness suffered, I think, from being initially defined by a song that had elements of novelty to it. Despite a fervent following among a concentrated fan base, everything else they released, including subsequent albums, was met with staggering indifference. Once the disarming humor of “I’m an Adult Now” wore off, the college radio community collectively seemed to shrug them off. I was certainly guilty of it too. I snapped up Love Junk the first time I saw it in a used bin, but it was used to drop the big hit onto select mix tapes far more often than I ever put it into the CD player and let it spin to the end.

Maybe I’m projecting too much pathos onto the situation, though. Maybe it’s enough that the band had their moment in the dim sun of modern rock fame, getting some highlighted placement on relevant MTV programs and a reasonable number of plays from college radio DJs who were probably still laughing when they opened up the mic to backsell the song. That’s more than a lot of bands got. And all these years later, I still remember the song fondly and I’m betting the same is true of a lot of people who took an airshift somewhere on the left of the dial a couple decades ago. There are worse fates.

The Pursuit of Happiness, “I’m an Adult Now”

(Disclaimer: Love Junk appears to be out of print to me, although it is clearly available for digital purchase. By now, my skepticism about the likelihood that an artist will get due revenues from such a purchase have been shared with tiresome frequency. Regardless, I view the posting of this song as fair use, a concept that is defended with lessening rigor with each passing year and with each new infusion of cash into the corporate lobbying industry. Despite my convictions, I’ll gladly remove the song from the Interweb should I be contacted by anyone with legitimate authority to make such a request.)