I seldom circle back to cover something I’ve already written about once but when I wrote about Steve Rosenbaum’s amazing lost album collection of rough recordings from the 1980s Have A Cool Summer! Summer​-​Pop Demos And 4​-​Track Gems 1979​-​1989 it was only available on 8-track for fifty bucks. Now it’s out for much less on Big Stir Records, ready for digital download, and oh so worthy of your attention. You can read my original review here but I’m returning to the collection after seeing a young Rosembaum doing a live version of “Girl From Seventeen” and it reminded me what a superior track it is. I can’t really explain its effect on me. In 1983 I was finishing Grade 12 and starting broadcasting school and really didn’t have a clue what I was doing. But anchoring me was the rock and roll that hit me in the solar plexus: melodic and jangly, drawing from the 1960s but still marching into the future. It was then that I really connected with the music of Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, the Jam, Squeeze and probably most of all, Marshall Crenshaw. To my ears “Girl From Seventeen” is just so Marshall. The guitar sound, the chord changes, the echo on the vocals, the vocal line that stretches into the instrumental break. The  Beach Boys organ trill kicking things off is just the frosting here.

A lot of the 1980s frankly sucked for me but the bright spots were definitely the music. So thank you Steve Rosenbaum for giving me a little bit more of the best of 1983 with this track.

You can hang with Steve here. And why not buy his whole album from Bandcamp? If you dig this track you won’t regret it.