My musical education started late. For most of my childhood, I was a devotee of the most appallingly, appealingly overbearing members of the classical canon (more epic science-fiction movie trailers were imagined to Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” than is comfortable to recall) and for my first two years of high school I was a Beatles obsessive and a frightening Dylan zealot respectively, my acceptance of anything recorded after 1975 came late; and my ability to discern, within that newly opened pool, between brilliance, adequacy, and disaster came later still. Between the two advances lay a strange, gangly kind of critical adolescence: clicking on “sort by date” in my MP3 directory and scrolling all the way to the left reveals an eclecticism I wish I still had, in which a single Manic Street Preachers track (”If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”) rubs shoulders with far too many John Williams themes, the Wallflowers’ cover of “Heroes”, and not one but two Sixpence None the Richer albums, both of which—unlike, say, Kid A or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea—I still own. Living in Hawaii, devoid of musical guidance, I stumbled through stuff like this for two years; it’s ironic, then, that leaving Hawaii, and stranding myself jobless and a little worried in an apartment building in southeast Portland, should be what leads me to revisit my old tastes for Stylus material. Three songs, then, from two years in the wilderness:

Remy Zero - Glorious #1
When OK Computer came out, a few critics, while adding their voices to the general (and generally deserved) fellatory chorus, observed that, no matter how much credit you gave Thom Yorke and co. for breaking boundaries, melding genres, instilling new vitality, etc., you had to admit that “Electioneering” wasn’t a very good song; in fact, it was precisely the kind of thing that, choking the airwaves in 1995, had made The Bends look so great. Remy Zero, an Alabama band who contributed title songs to She’s All That and every episode of Smallville but as far as I can tell never sold a single record to anyone, suffered not so much for being a Radiohead cover band as for being an “Electioneering” cover band. While their 2001 album The Golden Hum owes mercifully less to the chime-and-soar Britpop template than did earlier efforts like 1998’s Villa Elaine, Remy Zero still does too little with the material; after a while all the cosmic bombast begins to resemble a starfield screensaver. That said, “Glorious #1″ is not a bad slice of early-00s pop-rock; there’s a primal, Holstian joy in its fake urgency that cynicism just barely fails to unseat, and the fuzzy, conspicuously overprocessed chorus is kitschily cyberpunky. This still makes it onto the occasional mix CD.

Sheryl Crow - There Goes the Neighborhood
As I recall, this played over the closing credits to a movie called Hurlyburly, which consisted of Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey doing a lot of coke and yelling at each other, while Chazz Palminteri beat up Anna Paquin and Garry Shandling engaged in a relentless series of inappropriate smiles. It’s arguably awful, with an aggressively low-fi beat and hipper-than-Dylan lyrics—and yet it’s not; it’s kind of awesome, especially when the meter forces Crow to enunciate “police” POE-lice, and when, in the spaces between the lyrics, the rat-a-tat handclaps pound their way into that reptilian part of the brain exploited so effectively by British Invasion bands and the “Kill Bill” soundtrack. Crow’s lyrics nudge the blunt and mediocre—”we can’t be certain who the villians are ’cause everyone’s so pretty”—against the agreeably deadpan—”but the afterparty’s sure to be a wing-ding as it moves into your city”—in a hazy patchwork of social criticism that’s fun more often than it isn’t. Also, the chorus has Peter Ustinov in it.

Sixpence None the Richer - I Can’t Catch You
This was a hard choice to make. Objectively, Sixpence’s albums are about as forgettable as their hit single “Kiss Me” was transcendent—while everything about “Kiss Me” seems pure and delicate and special, the rest of the band’s music, dealing with far less well-trodden themes and far more complex lyrics, somehow manages to recede into mundanity. There are good songs on Sixpence’s albums—songs like “We Have Forgotten,” whose slow-mo guitars lope alongside Leigh Nash’s unfailingly sweet voice; or “Within a Room Somewhere,” with its inhale-exhale verses and Remy-Zero-ish chorus; but I’d forgotten they existed until I started to write this piece, and “I Can’t Catch You” has always eked out an existence somewhere on the periphery of my memory. As “Kiss Me”’s little sister, it’s worthy but ultimately superfluous; by itself, it’s sweet and graceful and hummable even if the seams show: a good fireworks display rather than the Aurora Borealis. The verses are only serviceable—”I’m feeling the pain of all these bags in the way” is one of the most inexplicably awkward lines I’ve ever heard—but it’s the chorus that makes it a shame nobody listened: Nash intersperses repetitions of the title with deeply charming coos, which the producer pushes into the faux-distance, probably by twisting a knob marked “ethereal.” Looking back on the far-left side of my directory, this is one of the few songs that still seems special, and though Sixpence None the Richer is hardly the pinnacle of respectability even to those who still champion “Kiss Me,” this is the only song that explains my decision, sometime in high school, not to give everything up and go back to Holst.

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