You Learn Something Old Every Day

"You Learn Something Old Every Day" is one in a long line of lead-off tracks that in no way prepare the listener for the music that will follow. The song is as musically minimal as they come, built on the sound of a drumstick bounced on a snare drum with heavy echo. As this fades in, Pollard then sings the lyric:

Exposure is knowledge
We have pictures to prove it
Perpetual crisis
Manifested modern and updated
Is it not good?
Cans of worms worth purchasing?
Open them up
And discover what?

It's an existential little ditty, to be sure, something that would work better as a "poem" in one of Pollard's Eat publications. When he's done, the drum is again the only sound, its diminishing reverberations creating a sort of low rumbling his beneath it all.

As written about in previous posts, Pollard clearly likes the title of this song. Though it doesn't appear in the lyric here, it does in two other songs: "7 Strokes to Heaven's Edge" on the Hardcore UFOs boxed set and in "The Great Blake Street Canoe Race" on Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia.

The music that follows on the rest of this EP is fairly straight-forward Pollard rock, with his brother, Jim, and latter-day Guided by Voices guitarist Nate Farley accompanying him. Get past this short, not terribly compelling track, and you'll find one of the better Fading Captain releases.