Good Morning

Before Capitol Records would release The Dandy Warhols Come Down, they rejected an entire album. In late 1995, the Portland four-piece — Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Zia McCabe, Peter Holmström, and Brent DeBoer — recorded a dense, deranged slab of psych-rock that became known as the Black Album. Capitol passed. They brought in producer Tony Lash, cleared out the more difficult material, and made a second, more commercially viable version. That second version became ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down, released on July 15, 1997 — one of the stranger major-label debut stories of the decade, a record that sounds effortlessly cool precisely because it was made twice.

Good Morning is the quietest and most unexpected track on the album — a psych-folk reverie that Taylor-Taylor described as being in the style of Lloyd Cole. That reference tells you everything: Lloyd Cole in his Commotions period made literate, melancholic pop that sounded like nothing else on the British charts, and Good Morning has exactly that quality — unhurried, melodic, somehow both drowsy and precise. Set against an album that also contains "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" and the sprawling narcotic drift of "Minnesoter," it arrives like a morning after a very long night, which is presumably exactly what Taylor-Taylor intended.

The Dandy Warhols went on to make Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia in 2000 — the album that contained "Bohemian Like You," which became famous globally through a Vodafone advertisement and eventually soundtracked half the decade. Their story was documented in the 2004 film DiG!, which followed them and The Brian Jonestown Massacre through the 1990s in what remains one of the best music documentaries ever made. Good Morning belongs to a different mood entirely — the Dandy Warhols before the fame, still recording in Taylor-Taylor's apartment, still making music that surprised even the people paying for it.