"Absolutely (Story of a Girl)" by ninedays

Song 8:

"Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” by Ninedays

Peak: 6

Year: 2000

Year end position: 35

Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/1

Chronological Songs by Artist: 1/1

Video?: Yes

Wikipedia?:  Yes:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolutely_%28Story_of_a_Girl%29

Spotify?:  Yes

Lyrics:   http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ninedays/absolutelystoryofagirl.html

Every so often as I go through this list, I think it would be fun to put a quiz together.  Today’s song works for at least 2 quizzes I can think of.  The first of them is essentially “Name That Tune”.  If I had to guess, almost everyone that hears this song thinks the title is “The Story of a Girl”.  That seems to be the most prominent part of the chorus, but the title is kind of buried at the end the chorus, and is not at all obvious.  The song could just as easily been named “Photographs” or “When She Smiles”….  except that it’s not.  I’m not one to second guess the naming of the song.  I think the naming convention of this song is interesting, especially when you are going through all the songs in alphabetical order.  This is not the song you expect to hear here.  That makes it fun.

The second quiz I would add this song to is: “Name the Artist”, where I would give you the title, year and peak position, and you would have to guess who sang the song.  Again, I think that most people could guess all day and never come up with ninedays.  For those that are curious why I am not capitalizing the “N” in ninedays, it’s because that’s the way the band itself styles their name.  Why?  I have no idea.  As evidence that this would be a hard quiz, I offer up myself.  I’ve been listening to this song for the better part of a week and looking up information about the band, and before I sat down to write this post, I completely forgot who sang the song.  Poor ninedays.  They deserve better.

This song marks the first time on the blog we’ve had a subtitle to a song.  I’m not even sure that subtitle is the correct term for the part of the title that is in parenthesis, but that’s what I’ve decided to call it.  For future reference, there are several songs where the parenthesis comes at the start of the title (think "(I’ve had) The Time of My Life”).  The correct way to alphabetize songs like that is to have them all at the beginning since punctuation comes before numbers and also before letters.  I made an executive decision to ignore the parenthesis if they come at the beginning of the title.  It’s not correct, but neither is spelling out all the numbers, and I’m doing that too.

I was looking up the band ninedays and equivalent chart runs, and the closest parallel I could find was a one-hit wonder from the year before.  The chart success for this song is roughly equivalent to Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” in both chart position and timing.  I think that this proves that not all one-hit wonders are built the same.  Eiffel 65 was a bit of a novelty act, whereas ninedays seems like a band that actually paid their dues in the music industry.  From what I could tell, they only released one major studio album.  They made a second one, but due to some dispute with Sony, it was never released.  They didn’t have the master tapes, so no one ever got to hear the follow up album.  That seems strange to me based on the success of this song.  Then again, they had a whole album of songs and this was the only one to even crack the top 60.  Hard to say who was right in that dispute.

The lyrics of this song seem to tell the story of someone that is love with a girl who is depressed.  The singer seems pretty frustrated with the girl, but there is a certain moment (when she smiles) where he decides that all of the baggage that comes with this girl is worth it.  I struggled to figure out how the lyrics in the pre-chorus (Your hair never falls in quite the same way / you never run out of things to say) fit that theme, but they carry the song along and they are catchy, so maybe that’s all you need.

There is a video for this song, but I watched it a few times and I was a little confused as to what kind of story it was trying to tell.  There is a performance part, which I get.  There is a girl in a bathtub where the water spills over onto the floor at the beginning.  The water then starts to seep into the downstairs apartment and shorts out a TV, causing a fire.  There is also a small section with a car accident outside.  I don’t quite see how that relates to the song.  It ends with the girl from the bathtub smiling at the band as the lights go out all over LA.  It’s not particularly memorable, but for a first time video, I guess it’s OK.

This song never really made an impression on me when it was popular.  I’m sure I heard it on the radio a million times, and I bet I sang along to it at the time.  I also bet I said, “Oh yeah – I remember that song” when it would come up on the year end countdown shows.  I’d say it was a fun song.  Nothing too deep or profound, but fun.