This record is a fairly typical in many ways: teenage garage sound, low budget recording, not terribly sophisticated sentiment...why do I find it so perfect? In terms of construction, it has a bit more going on for it than most, the melody and harmonies are nice, but I think what really sells it for me is that it's just so...believable. The singer seems so sincerely distraught by this petty adolescent spat despite the fact he's not even direclty involved, and I find his concern just ludicrously moving. This is one reason I get kind of snarky when somebody (usually some punk rock kid in his early 20s) dismisses a band or song as "just pop" or "just a love song." Like they really spend more time fuming about the fact that their tax dollars pay for illegal wars in central America than they do mooning about their crush on the new teller. Wankers.

Not to be confused with the Journeymen, a "Mighty Wind" folk outfit, this Journey Men was a garage band from Florida that seems to have only made the one record. I fell in love with this song on some forgotten 60s comp that presented it in fuzzy, mediocre sound; when I saw that it appeared on a new comp CD called Total Raunch, I immediately picked one up, hoping for a sound upgrade. Well, it is a little better, but slower; I'm guessing the version I was used to was mastered at an incorrect, slightly faster speed.