The Best Songs Ever Recorded By Anyone Ever: Gin Blossoms, "Found Out About You"

This is not an honor the Gin Blossoms gained quickly. As a precocious SPIN-reading snot during their heyday, I respected the band’s craft but wouldn’t dream of rating New Miserable Experience over 14 Songs. Paul Westerberg was an underappreciated genius I was still scrounging down albums by, and the Blossoms took a few good singles to the bank. They knew who Marshall Crenshaw was, were wise to seek his melodic advice, but - having read every record guide I could - I was going spend my rare tens and twenties on Marshall Crenshaw. Who was only three bucks on used vinyl anyway.  More moolah for the flop Vertigo comics in another store's dollar bin. Damn, I was smooth.

Even in those glory days, I thought “Found Out About You” was just some middling midtempo number about being mad and mean about a girl. “Hey Jealousy” was the rockin’ breakthrough, “Until I Fall Away” the devotional ballad, “Alison Road” proof they were bubblegum, if tolerable (again, this was the perspective of a pre-ethernet, lawn-raking teenage paperboy told by critics that The Fall had at least a dozen 9s out of 10 to go find).

But by 2005, experience with sex and (mild) drugs belatedly informing my rock & roll, I’d gone and ranked “Found Out About You” the 61st best Modern Rock #1 single to date, right between “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get” and “Walkin’ On The Sun” (warning: I could still wind up putting several dozen modern rock number ones under the banner of Best Songs Ever Recorded By Anyone Ever. I'm easy.). Sayeth me then: I may be overrating this due to "Hey Jealousy"'s absence from the list, but despite Robin Wilson's failure to deliver would-be-Westerberg-wound-up-Stinson Doug Hopkins' lyric with any bite whatsoever, they achieve enough hook & harmony to compensate. Post-R.E.M. state of the middle of the road. Snide enough for you? To be fair, that asshole going on about “bite” was still hoping to really appreciate Tom Waits someday.

Instead, I now really appreciate Robin Wilson. Not as much as Andrew Unterberger did in his fantastic profile of Wilson for Billboard, but the vocals on “Found Out About You” are more “if you know, you know” than “I must convince everyone from small children to grandparents that I know.” I was a noob to think someone was missing the boat just because they didn’t stand atop one half-alive and wearing a pirate hat. And I apologize.

It was sometime even later when it hit me the song might not be about a guy realizing he’s in love with a ho. A more presumptuous writer might even claim that "Found Out About You" is actually about drugs. “Rumors follow everywhere you go”? “In all the places you hang out/ they know your name and they know what you’re about”?  Whispers at the bus stop, nights in the school yard? As this was written by Doug Hopkins, fired by the band for incapacitating drug use and dead a month before "Found Out" became a modern rock #1, maybe “you” is…heroin? Yes, there’s a reference to her new boyfriend, but the degree to which the narrator is rueful and possessed makes a lot more sense if the jezebel isn’t actually human.

But Hopkins did reference a boyfriend. Maybe he really got burnt that bad, or maybe it was a genre exercise. A song doesn’t have to be literally about one thing. Semisonic’s “Closing Time” is infinitely more affecting when you know it’s at least partly inspired by childbirth (“time for you to go out to the places you will be from”) but one hopes Dan Wilson isn’t telling a fetus to “finish your whiskey or beer.” There’s no law saying a songwriter has to make a song into a consistent metaphor or narrative. A pop ditty can work despite a lack of coherency, or even thanks to it. Whiff grammatical logic hard enough and earnestly sung gibberish can be a hook - just ask Max “I Want It That Way” Martin.

Whether you think the song is sweating sex or a syringe, “Found Out About You” conveys something dark and addictive. It’s about being seduced and abandoned. Fucking around and finding out. Radio programmers certainly appreciated it as punchy romantic rock just a touch more aggro than Toad The Wet Sprocket, explicitly yearning, with nobody asking if Andy is goofin’ on Elvis. But there’s a strain of shame & pain under the arpeggios I was too innocent to pick up on and I’m still too rational to fully relate to. Today, I’m left to wonder how many people didn’t miss it and did relate.