I was working in the music department at Borders Books & Music when this came out. We were 10 years past the explosion of grunge and while there were some great albums being released, shit just felt like it had gotten stale and bland.

Then The Lips dropped Yoshimi and it blew our minds. It was creative, cohesive, unique, and the songs were well written. We played the shit out of it in the store. Since then, it’s been a constant in my life, always flirting with being in my top 10 albums list (most days I’d put it in there).

My family went through a string of loss over the course of a few years and I spent a lot of time with the album. While it’s ostensibly a song about a failed relationship, Fight Test came to more generally be a song about overcoming loss for me. It became so closely entwined with death that I get tears in my eyes almost every time I hear it now. Not in a sad way, necessarily, just as a reminder that some people I’ve loved are gone and it wasn’t what any of us had planned, but we go on and try to live our lives the best way we can.

With that part said, the two songs surrounding Do You Realize seem like weak points, but not total stinkers.