Please Freeze Me
As much as I love the full-blown majesty of Guided by Voices when the band was firing on all cylinders, I'm just as captivated (and occasionally more so) by Robert Pollard with an acoustic guitar in his lap. "Please Freeze Me" is a little gem of a song that was apparently cut for Bee Thousand (the fourth version, according to the GBV Database), and is among the few so labeled that didn't make the expanded "Director's Cut" reissue of that album).
I'd argue that it deserved a place on the album proper. It's better than some of the songs on the latter half of that record, and its 1:17 runtime wouldn't overburden the album's 36:30 total. Regardless, it would have fit well, a very strong melody, a good Pollard vocal and little enough fidelity that it wouldn't stick out unduly.
It almost feels like something Pollard made up on the spot, and perhaps it was. That he didn't ever do anything with it (beyond releasing it on the band's first odds & sods collection as part of its first boxed set), is strange. Then again, it was such a fertile period that Pollard likely felt as if he could crank out tunes like this all day. At the time, he was right.
I'd argue that it deserved a place on the album proper. It's better than some of the songs on the latter half of that record, and its 1:17 runtime wouldn't overburden the album's 36:30 total. Regardless, it would have fit well, a very strong melody, a good Pollard vocal and little enough fidelity that it wouldn't stick out unduly.
It almost feels like something Pollard made up on the spot, and perhaps it was. That he didn't ever do anything with it (beyond releasing it on the band's first odds & sods collection as part of its first boxed set), is strange. Then again, it was such a fertile period that Pollard likely felt as if he could crank out tunes like this all day. At the time, he was right.
Labels: King Shit and the Golden Boys