Song Of The Day 5/11/2015: Silver Sun – “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late”

Quarterly Covers Report: “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late” was the last big hit for Johnny Mathis, and the first for Deniece Williams. Coming at the end of the ’70s to harsh the free love generation’s mellow, “TMTLTL” was the bittersweet sound of the upper middle class prying itself apart with as much dignity and as little body count as socioeconomically possible. The woman would turn to the bay window draped by a filmy curtain and stare out at the strong-ribbed oak tree, now impotent as a metaphor. The man, still in his 9-to–5 light blue business jacket, would grab his car keys from an end table in the foyer and leave tenderly out the front door, part of his soul arrested in the melted wax figure fantasies of yesteryear, then drive blindly to a cocktail lounge near the airport whose tales of transience are told by incognito wine stains on a drab brown carpet. That kind of thing.

It didn’t seem like a likely candidate to be updated by a British power pop band, but Lord bless Silver Sun, not to be confused with the Silversun Pickups, for turning in a crunch-guitar version that’s almost not ironic. A decent reverse engineering of Britpop, in a way, that wouldn’t sound out of place on an album by Blur or Oasis or Pulp or Suede or Bulb or Steak or Inlet or Char or Steep or Glue or Spork. In this rendition, the woman crushes out a cigarette on a checkerboard kitchen floor and works frantically to reverse the flow of time and actually succeeds for about two weeks. The man finishes art school but gets stuck in middle management, and settles down with a woman he accidentally met through the deacon of his church. The more things change, eh?