"Stars" by Hum

In the nineties, a secret US government agency adbucted a little-known rock band from Illinois and conducted a long and humiliating series of experiments on them. Then they taught them advanced physics. Then they fired them into outer space on a rocket ship. Then they broke their hearts. This story is not true.

Somewhere around the turn of the millenium.  I was a teenager and heard this tune once on the radio.  Several years later, heard it again and remembered it. Starts innocently enough, a soft little guitar lick, the simple chorus delivered awkwardly in a dull, tender voice. Then a shockingly sharp blast of guitar and drums. Are you awake now? A lingering echo. The guitar starts up again gently, the drums kick in, and suddenly I'm in the middle of this overwhelming driving pounding swirling wave of sound. How could I forget it? It was one of those rare "holy-crap-I-absolutely-need-to-know-what-song-this-is" moments. So I e-mailed the radio station and they told me it was a song called "Stars" by a band named Hum.  I stopped by the record store during a break between classes and managed to find a copy of the album, You'd Prefer An Astronaut.  Their third album and first on a major label, released in 1995, it has an unassuming green cover with a zebra staring lonely back at you.  At home, gave it a spin, and was disappointed. Unfortunately, none of the other songs hit me like the one I'd heard on the radio (track 3). I put the disc away.

At that age, I couldn't understand why the Beatles were such a big deal.  But I once bought a Limp Bizkit CD off my younger brother. Our musical tastes grow and mature along with the rest of our selves.

A few weeks later, I remembered the thrill of hearing "Stars" on the radio and decided that the album deserved a second chance.  And I didn't dislike it as much. In fact, every time I listened to it, I liked it more. Each of the tracks, and the album as an artistic whole, was growing on me and gaining new levels of meaning.  Especially the softer stuff.  "Songs of Farewell and Departure," for example, will forever in my memory serve as the soundtrack to my final days working at summer camp before it was shut down.

Now that I think about it, the strange broken-hearted post-grunge science-rock I heard on You'd Prefer an Astronaut, full of love and sadness and intellect, was a key component in expanding my musical horizons beyond the borders I knew as a teen.  Those borders were the line that Hum walked with "Stars," clearly their most accessible radio-friendly track, and then pulled me across.

Sadly, by the time I fell in love with Hum, the group had long since disbanded. Its members had gone on to play in other bands or lead normal lives raising families or working in pharmacies or something. But that wasn't the last of this humble "space rock" outfit from Champaign, Illinois.  In 2007, "Stars" was resurrected in a series of Cadillac TV commercials.  And in the last few years, the band has performed a number of sold-out reunion shows in Chicago.

So any time I meet someone who seems to know a lot about music, I try to mention Hum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfbn3ieVUYU