The song of the day is “Tracy I Luv You,” from Luna. Tracy was first recorded for the Penthouse sessions (released in 1995), and left off the record. It was later collected on the deluxe version. The Penthouse version sounds pretty finished to me, however the band would hold it back and rework it for Pup Tent. It is hard to say where the song would have been sequenced if it had made the cut. Especially in the early version, it is not as uptempo as “Chinatown,” still the obvious single. It would also not have fit well around “23 Minutes in Brussels,” which needs its own space. I could see it sequenced second, with “Sideshow by the Seashore” moved to anchor the back half somewhere–but that’s party because I like Tracy better than Sideshow. Or, it could have gone late–say 11th if Penthouse had had 12 tracks. I like a really sneaky good song like Tracy second to last. A good example of this move is on Lambchop’s Flotus, where “NIV” sits 10th and sets up the shaggy-epic “The Hustle.” Here, Tracy would set up “Bonnie and Clyde,” maybe not a natural fit but I kind of like it. The Penthouse version is only 3:50 though, while the Pup Tent version is 4:50. 4:50 is a better length to set up a song like Bonnie.

Anyway, the slightly more syrupy, marginally slower early version was redone and ended up on 1997’s Pup Tent. I like the fact that the new version gets an one minute extended outro with the cascade of “doooo/ doo doo doo,” though I’m not sure that I don’t like the early version better. Pup Tent’s sound was notoriously labored over, and in his memoir Wareham writes that Tracy was especially tough to get the vocal for. Although the album was trying to record, Wareham writes that “Pup Tent was not our best record, but it was our best-sounding record, containing all kinds of sonic textures.” He also told filmmaker Noah Baumbach in 2016 that “there are some really cool sounding things on Pup Tent; ‘Pup Tent’ itself, ‘Tracy I Love You,’ ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy.’ So, sonically, I love it.” Indeed Tracy has stayed on the set list and established itself as one of the standouts of Luna’s catalog.

The song opens with a classic Wareham verse:

Tell me stories on my birthday/ buy me gifts on Halloween/ she’s pretending not to know me/ but I know where she’s been.

Nobody does needy/ cheeky/ sly/ sexy in quite the same combination as peak Wareham.

Two verses later we get another deeply quotable verse:

I spend too much time in airplanes/ eating peanuts and getting high/ don’t know why I can’t stop smiling/ when I only need to cry.

It is this verse especially that I prefer on the Penthouse sessions–there is a weird stuttering reverb that almost pulls the vocal back in time–it’s like a car trying and not quite getting into third gear. For the Pup Tent version, Eden’s guitar behind the vocal has been improved, and the vocal is much smoother. To each their own–both versions rock.