I get sick of songs. It happens. And it especially happened back when my main resource for hearing music comprised of a handful of commercial radio stations and a couple of cable channels filling their programming schedule exclusively with music videos. The cycle of label-directed redundancy wasn’t as bad as it is now, but it was still oppressive enough that songs shifted from novel to familiar to smash-that-record-against-the-fucking-wall well before various programmers grew disinterested in indulging in saturation airplay. The list of qualifying songs I could compose is too long and horrifying to ponder, but I will openly acknowledge that “Welcome to the Boomtown” by David & David has a place on the tally.

It probably seems like an odd selection for such a complaint, especially since it barely crossed into the Billboard Top 40, which surely indicates it wasn’t nearly as annoying ubiquitous as other songs from the same year. Still, it was a favorite of the stations that I preferred. It felt like it was on all the time, and it plainly wore me out.

Since that was the case, I didn’t wasn’t exactly the target market for the first solo album from David Baerwald. Judging by the release date noted in various online sources for Bedtime Stories, it may have even arrived at the college radio station during the spring of 1990, when I would’ve been anxiously cruising the new release section to find stuff to play. It wasn’t until I went home for the summer–the one and only time I made that mistake–that I truly discovered the album’s lead single, a plaintive, detailed yearning rock growl of desire called “All for You.” It was immediately recognizable as a cousin of the earlier hit, but something about it spoke to me far more, in a way that almost guaranteed that the song would never become something I’d discard due to overexposure.

My hometown radio stations may have been too timid to play the new tracks from Sonic Youth and Bob Mould that I was really craving (thankfully, I knew which nooks of MTV to look to find those, even though the process of eroding away the accuracy of the “Music” part of the channel’s name was already under way), but at least one of them embraced the Baerwald song as if it would satisfy as wide a range of the public as the latest from Madonna. I may never have played “All for You” when it came out in the spring, but by the time I returned to the college radio station in the fall, it immediately became a regular part of my playlists. Like a lot of the songs I loved most back then, it sounded best in an lonely, dark air studio at around one in the morning. If you get a chance, try it sometime.

David Baerwald, “All for You”

(Disclaimer: It looks to me like Bedtime Stories is out of print. Buying it digitally doesn’t seem to be an option, either, a characteristic it shares with most of Baerwald’s fairly modest catalog. It’s posted here with the belief that the song is not available in manner the will provide due compensation to both the artist and also the proprietor of your favorite local, independently-owned record store. I may be wrong. I hold no overt pride in my assertion that would be unduly damaged by discovering the opposite of my assumption is true. So if some devout holder of the copyright of this track should take offense at its distribution from this point for free–I’m certainly not making any money off of this–then the only step that needs to be taken is contacting me and requesting the files removal. Demanding such an action will also do the trick, but that seems unnecessarily gruff to me. Regardless, the point is that I will take it down if I’m asked to do so by anyone who has any business whatsoever asking for it to be taken down.)