“Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns”
by Mother Love Bone
from the soundtrack to the film Singles
1992
Buy the album on Amazon

The Singles soundtrack is  the most consistently good compilation that came out of the 90s.  I think Chris would agree that by and large, most soundtracks are disappointing in that they have one or two great songs and the rest is just filler.  But with Singles, the music supervisor totally nailed it.  Super music fan and journalist Cameron Crowe directed the film so it’s not surprising.  What was surprising for me at the time, was that the heart of the album wasn’t a track by Alice in Chains or Soundgarden or even Pearl Jam, but rather Mother Love Bone.

At the time the movie and album came out, I wasn’t totally aware of the history of Seattle bands.  The fact that this band I hadn’t really heard of totally created the best track on the album blew me away.  Since then I’ve become engrossed in Seattle music history.  Not an expert, but an obsessive fan for sure.  I can highly recommend the documentary Hype! and the excellent book, Everybody Loves Our Town.  And I of course learned of Mother Love Bone’s place in history and it became less of a surprise that my favorite song from the film and a probable top ten song of all time is “Crown of Thorns.”

I must have listened to this song a million times by now.  I’ve purchased the soundtrack twice because it got so scratched the first half a million spins.  The lyrics are totally burned into my brain, not because I’ve ever read them, but because of muscle memory, singing them loud in the car, every day. For years.  A perfect candidate for a karaoke song, alas it’s never shown up in any songbook I’ve come across.  You’ll have to settle for Pearl Jam covering it instead:

Yeah, they nailed it.