please tell me your favourite 10,000 Maniacs song and why

it was actually a video production class, not video art
the narrative music video was an assignment we had and apparently this is the best idea we could come up with

Listening to "In My Tribe," and it's a struggle. Just not my thing, I guess. It's like a pretentious, less interesting ... Kirsty MacColl?

Maybe try the Hope Chest compilation? That's the very earliest of their recordings all in one place.

Will try. That other stuff was sort of insufferable.

I love love loved In My Tribe when it came out. Don't Talk was always my favorite but now Hey Jack Kerouac

You win a prize for that
For telling lies like that

I was into In My Tribe when it came out, but I've bonded the most with Blind Man's Zoo and it's remained my favorite for 25 years.

The first minute of "Planned Obsolescence" with the dub-influenced bass, organ, crazy guitar effects, and Merchant's frightened voice is spooky 4 a.m.-college-radio-in-1982 shit.

So is all this stuff good, or is this nostalgia speaking? That is, if this is not already a part of my formative listening history, is it something I have any chance/need to get into on the cusp of 40?

Well, you don't need to eat sunflower seeds, but they're alright if they're lying around.

Faint praise.

"Planned Obsolescence" sounds OK, in a minor Martha and the Muffins sort of way. Will stick with Hope Chest a bit.

This is "My Mother The War" for me, too. Love the New Order-y bass, the washes of noise guitar and Natalie's a match for early Stipe in the inscrutable mumblings department. I like plenty of their later stuff fine, but once Joe Boyd decided they were Fairport Convention and then Peter Asher started glossing things up even further, I began to lose interest. Still really love her voice.

it is not good imo

Here are fifteen tracks, boring in a weird way or weirdly boring.

what for?

man this popped up on my shuffle today and it was possible to remember why they created such a stir in the college rock world at one point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Be784nT5k

“These Are Days” is my favorite 10,000 Maniacs song (and I was heavily into this band as a teen, deep into all their shit).

That song — their big, late-career “hit” — is kind of an arrestingly perfect single to me, even now.

I was deep into that “Verdi Cries” and “Poor De Cherico” shit, Holmes!

“Verdi Cries” is a gorgeous song.

I don't consider myself THAT big a fan, but I can name at least a dozen songs which haven't even been mentioned here that I absolutely adore.

But Jezebel wins (that whole album is gorgeous)

(Blind Man's Zoo was my very first CD)

I love "These Are Days."

"Scorpio Rising" would absolutely destroy on any mixtape of '80s rock tracks... what a song!

(this song "Cotton Alley," which I didn't even remember, is also casually better than 99.999% of extant songs)