Daily Jam - Stuck on You

I don’t know if anyone else out there does this, but sometimes I’ll get an album to listen to, usually a CD to be played in the car during my commute to and from work, and basically pretend it’s me performing it whilst singing along in the driver’s seat. I’ve done this for forever, but it has to be a good CD…a great CD…one of those CDs that’s an essential listen from start to finish. Throughout the years I’ve accrued a handful of albums that I keep coming back to over and over again specifically for this purpose, this driving daydream of musicianship, artistry, and mock rock stardom. And I’d posit that Failure’s 1996 space rock opus and masterpiece Fantastic Planet is my go-to album probably more than 50% of the time.

My introduction to the band came by way of the band Replicants, a project that produced one album of covers featuring Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards of Failure, members of the band Lusk, and Maynard James Keenan from Tool. A big fan of that record, I eventually sought out the musicians’ other output, coming across Fantastic Planet and the wonderful single “Stuck on You.” From the opening, high-pitched guitar riff (though it may actually be a synthesizer for all I know), harmonic tones ringing in my ears and the heavens above, I fell hard for that song. The slow and pounding beat propels ever forward with crunching, spacey guitar layered on top, Ken Andrews’ nasal and almost monotone vocal delivery sounding alien and worldly at the same time. There’s a bubblegum pop aesthetic at work too, a sweet and hooky melody that could play in my brain ad infinitum if I were so inclined. Lyrically, “Stuck on You” is about being unable to escape a pop song, radio detritus coursing through our veins forever, or maybe it’s a lament about love, or maybe it’s about drugs, or maybe it’s something else entirely.

Is it all of these things?

Either way, I’ll love it forever, and I’ll go on pretending it’s me who made it, singing it in my car on the stadium stage of my daydreams.

“Stuck on you til the end of time.”