“Adeline, Out of Tune” by The New Amsterdams

10. Song No. 61: “Adeline, Out of Tune,” The New Amsterdams
Para Toda Vida, 2002

I mean, I feel like we all loved The Get-Up Kids. But The New Amsterdams was always my Pryor project of choice. “Para Toda Vida” was one of those albums I was waiting for since I met its predecessor and, while it didn’t quite live up to the acoustic earnestness that I still love about “Never You Mind,” it is a deeply satisfying sophomore album. 

But the album had three things working for it that would have forgiven an overall album I loved half as much: “Stay on the Phone” (which I got Matt Pryor to play at some long-ago festival in a tiny room inside the pre-gentrification Asbury Park Convention Center, either Bamboozle or Skurf), “All Ears” and this track, which would be the closest thing I’d get to hearing my name in a song until I discovered The Decemberists’ “Apology Song,” and is tremendously significant for that reason alone.