“The Ballad of Winnie”
by Tribe after Tribe
from the album Pearls Before Swine
1997
Buy the album on Amazon

Scattered throughout my digital library are lonely orphan songs which contain the only appearance from that particular artist in my collection.  Most of these come from a time when file-sharing was new and exciting.  You’d search for a bunch of random stuff you had heard about but had never seen in a store, or maybe had a jonzing for that catchy track you heard on the radio.  Every search was an attempt to fill up the empty hours at night and the megabytes on your hard drive.  Most of these songs have been lost to time,  played once and forgotten.  Most are missing key pieces of metadata.  But every now and then one of those songs will stick out.  It’ll make the move from computer to computer.  You might even end up buying a higher bit rate version later on iTunes or Amazon.  And if when it comes on shuffle, which is rare in a sea of complete discographies and ever-increasing collections, you’ll listen to it and remember.

I had completely forgotten about this song till sometime last year when it came up on shuffle.  I immediately changed the rating to a five-star so it would come up more often and it’s been in regular rotation since.  I’m not exactly sure where or when I collected it but I’m sure it must have come up in a search of tracks that Dug Pinnick from King’s X had guested on, as he’s the one singing the soulful, gospel-like chorus.  It’s a political song about Winne Mandela, by a bunch of world music genre players.  None of those things would normally move me, but because Dug sings on it, and Jeff Ament from Pearl Jam plays bass, I was exposed to it via some string of search terms.  Will I pick up the rest of Tribe After Tribe’s discography?  Not likely.  There’s something kind of magical about having a single song you love.  You can never be disappointed by the follow-up.