Been a long while since I listened to We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic. That’s the third album by indie rock duo Foxygen. It’s now more than 10 years since it’s been available for listening and heard it for the first time myself. 18-year-old me was all for it. I thought, “This could be a band that I’ll be listening to for years to come.” It didn’t really work out that way, more my own fault than theirs. This is all a story I’ve told once before. I should properly go through the discography one of these days. There’s still time.

‘Shuggie’ is the sixth track on Peace & Magic. Obviously I would have heard it when going through the album initially all that time ago. But it wasn’t maybe until around 2018 when I heard it again and truly came round to appreciating it. I was in my first job out of uni, working in a little music studio in London. My colleague was on the reception desk handling payments and all the good stuff. She had Spotify on, which was playing through the speakers, and was on a playlist of some kind when ‘Shuggie’ came on. I knew it was a Foxygen song, but by that point it really had probably been five years since I last heard it. Hearing it at a suitable volume for an indoor waiting room environment and listening to its various tempo and mood changes, it got me thinking the song should have been a favourite of mine for that time.

Lyrically, the song’s a short tale about unrequited love. But though these feelings between the narrator and the person they fall for are unreciprocated, the song takes a more optimistic note and makes a point to realize the person within yourself and be happy with who you are in order to overcome adversity. Or something like that. Or maybe it’s all some sort of defence mechanism to distract the narrator from how they really feel. Whatever the message, I’m all for it. Sam France’s aloof vocals are a treat. But what I think is the highlight of the entire thing is the movement of the music from one section to the next. It’s all very ’70s chamber-pop inspired, before changing up the energy for almost-soulful choruses, then switching back and slowing down into the contemplative verses. There’s a little groovy interlude that comes to an abrupt end, which then suddenly shifts to the swinging, upbeat “ba-da-da-da” outro then fades on out. It’s a little rollercoaster of a song, all in a radio-friendly 3-and-a-half minutes. One of the duo’s most popular numbers for a reason.