#172 (of 365) "Learned to Surf" Superchunk

Superchunk is my favorite band of all time, but they weren't always. I've loved them like crazy since I discovered them back in 1995 when "Hyper Enough" became a minor alternative radio / MTV hit, but they stopped recording music after 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, an album that I loved at the time but that hasn't aged that well and on the last show I saw of theirs, Mac offhandedly mentioned playing a track from one of their least played albums and someone in the audience said "what's your least played?" and it was on 9/11 of this year and Mac said "do you really have to ask on today's anniversary?" and yeah it clicked into place that Shutting Up came out a week after 9/11/2001 and had at least several unfortunate references ("Out on the Wing", the line in "Phone Sex" that says "plane crash footage on TV, I know, I know that could be me"). Anyway, either because the album didn't do well or because they thought they'd made their best music and moved on, the band moved on like so many bands before it and all the new indie rock bands I fell in love with in the 2000s were recording brilliant music and so Superchunk became for me, a bit of an afterthought. At some point in 2008 or 2009, Sunset Rubdown was my favorite band of all time and Spencer Krug my favorite artist, not Mac and Superchunk. 

Then in 2009, Superchunk released an EP called Leaves in the Gutter that featured this song, an acoustic version of this song, a track called "Misfits & Mistakes" that had already been released for a cartoon soundtrack and two other forgettable songs. So it really was "Learned to Surf" that brought the band back into my consciousness, and this song would reappear on 2010's Majesty Shredding, their first full-length since Shutting Up, and that album was so strong--maybe not quite up to their early 90s classics, but better than anything they had put out since, that Superchunk was sitting there as my #2 favorite band of all time again, for a couple years, reclaiming the spot once it became obvious that Sunset Rubdown would only make 3 great albums and not be releasing more music (they did, eventually but took another decade) and Superchunk claimed once and for all, the vaunted spot at the top of my favorite bands of all time, which they have now held for some 13 or 14 years. All because of this song.

"Learned to Surf" - Superchunk // Majesty Shredding (2010)