Just when Quebec was starting to get some love over here, it comes to a swift end. No more Quebec songs are to appear after this one. There is one on the album that begins with ‘Z’. I like it, but not to the extent that I do all the other tracks I’ve written about. So that’s how it is. Literally wrote about ‘Transdermal Celebration’ the other day, so I’ll spare the whole spiel about my feelings on the LP and its context. On that post, I did say there were five numbers on Quebec that would have had their own posts had the time been right. May as well list them out: ‘Among His Tribe’, ‘Happy Colored Marbles’, ‘Hey There Fancypants’, ‘Chocolate Town’ and ‘The Argus’. Always had a great time with those songs in particular. But as I feel I implied in the last post concerning Quebec, the album as a whole is very special. So we say farewell to it, and its last representative comes in the form of its sixth track, ‘Tried and True’.

At the time of writing this, ‘Tried and True’ is the most-played Quebec song on Spotify with 25+ million streams. A good 11 million more than the next. Not quite sure why that happened. Possibly through various playlist inclusions. I really like ‘Tried and True’ myself, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best song Quebec has to offer. But what I think it provides the people is some very easy listening. You just sit back in your most comfortable chair and let yourself sink into it while this song rides out. It’s helped by the fact that, and I’m pretty sure it’s the case, the band recorded it at a faster speed in its original key of C, before slowing it down to how it is on the album. Why would the band do that, you might ask. It just gives the track a certain character, I think. Makes the track sound a bit more spaced out. Hits some certain frequencies that wouldn’t be possible without the production tricks. And plus, it seems that whenever the band worked with producer Andrew Weiss, speed manipulation was the way to go a lot of the time.

In the live performance below, Gene Ween precedes the song by saying it’s one ‘about space and time’. I can’t really argue with that. I would put forward, there’s definitely something sexual about ‘Tried and True’ too. Is that fair to say? There’s certainly some double entendres that support that theory. “I woke, I was alone… rising”. “Rising” could refer to the physical act of getting out of bed or a classic case of morning wood. Then I’d say the song is about waking up with very strong blood flow and feeling untouchable, with a heavily cosmic spin put on it via the lyrics, reinforced by the electric sitar, the pulsating keyboards and floaty background vocals that come in nearing the song’s end. But I may also be completely wrong on that front. It also contains the cheekiest play on words with the “Could you smell my whole… life?” lyric. I tell you, I sung that out loud in front of my sister one time. She looked at me for a second during that pause between “whole” and “life” before I completed the lyric myself. And that was when I should maybe only reserve audible singing for times when there’s no one else in the room.