Daily Jam - The Air that I Breathe

Some circles may remember The Hollies’ 1974 hit “The Air that I Breathe” solely for its use in an early 90’s television commercial for house paint (I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid). Some might remember it for being the reason that Radiohead now pay royalties to songwriters Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood due to the song’s similarities to “Creep.” For some reason I remember it as background music to growing up in west Texas in the 1980’s. And I’m not sure why.

There’s a part of me that really wants to believe that my dad had a Hollies album, Hollies from whence the song appeared or a greatest hits compilation or something like that. And there’s another part of me that really wants to believe that said album was an 8-Track tape.

Naturally, I have no evidence to support these beliefs.

I suppose it’s certainly possible that in my dad’s music collection somewhere was a Hollies 8-Track. He had plenty of them in the mix with his vinyl and assorted cassette tapes (if memory serves, he may have even had a reel-to-reel in there somewhere), but the band doesn’t really fit into his wheelhouse. There were a handful of rock n’ roll records in my dad’s arsenal, but at his heart, he was a jazz and bluegrass kind of guy. And after he passed away a few years ago, my mom, my siblings, and I divvied up what we wanted to keep of the collection, and the rest was lost to time. I don’t recall ever seeing the mythical Hollies 8-Track in the bunch.

But “The Air that I Breathe” is prevalent in my memory of the time. Maybe it’s manufactured, or maybe I’m misremembering things, or maybe I heard it somewhere else that my mind can’t place. Our lazy brains can be notorious for just making shit up so that random things make some sort of coherent sense in our psyches. Why a 1970’s soft rock hit wormed its way into mine is beyond me.

Good jam though. Listen below, our Daily Jam.