Was sometime in 2005 when I first came across ‘Josie’. Blink-182 had quite recently split up, and the video for ‘Not Now’ was usually on the tele. That video played as a sort of clipshow of all the music videos the band had done up to that point. Some of them I hadn’t seen before. So I guess that stirred my curiosity and I went to check out the band’s older stuff.

Seeing the videos for ‘Dammit’ and ‘Josie’ I thought they were the most hilarious things I’d seen in my life. I was ten years old at the time. Even so, the humour in both clips hold up to this day. Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge ham up their acting performances just perfectly in the story aspects of the two promos. I’ve talked about ‘Dammit’ before though, so what about ‘Josie’?

Well, ‘Josie’ was released as a single from the band’s second album Dude Ranch in 1997. This was the last LP of the band’s featuring original drummer Scott Raynor, who was dismissed from the band the following years for reasons that no one knows for sure but is widely agreed that alcoholism was involved. The drumming on this particular track is just as frenetic and thunderous as the stuff Travis Barker would do from Enema onwards. Though Barker is definitely the better drummer, Raynor fills the role fine propelling the power-chord led track’s rhythm further and further with snare rolls and cymbal crashes.

The track is about having a girlfriend and the benefits that arise from the situation. Mark Hoppus wonders how he got this girl in the first place and how she hasn’t left him for another man already. But he takes great pleasure in the small things she does, and when he gets home late from work and she’s there – well, he’s happy to be alive. I do enjoy watching the video along with the music. It’s one of those that just makes the song sound better. Though it is a fantastic track by itself.