Way Back Whensday: Ash – Girl From Mars

Way Back Whensday is a new weekly feature looking back at great songs from the 90s that I was too musically ignorant of to appreciate at the time.

I’ve been watching a lot of Gilmore Girls episodes lately. This may seem like an odd way to open, but go with me on this. I’m a sucker for small town Americana drama, and after getting past the whole “it’s for girls” mentality, I discovered that it’s actually an incredibly well written show. One of my favourite parts about it is how culturally aware it is. Hell, an entire plot point of one episode centres on Belle & Sebastian, and this was years before they were turning up in every show known to man. Anyway, an episode I was watching a couple of weeks ago had ‘Girl From Mars’ by Ash on the soundtrack. Now I vaguely remember when the song first came out back in 1995, but something struck me when hearing it this time around: it’s a fantastic song. Now, it was probably a fantastic song back in 1995 too, but I was pretty ignorant when it came to music back then, only really starting to appreciate it four or five years later. Over the next couple of weeks I realised that there’s a lot of songs from that era that I couldn’t stand or ignored then, but find to be great now. Which is how we arrive at this new feature.

It seems dumb to me that I didn’t like a song like this at the time, but I guess that’s just the evolution of taste for you. The song itself tells a wonderful, melancholy tale about a lost summer romance with a girl he loved but never got close enough too. It’s full of lovely imagery of lazy days, playing cards and staring up at the stars. It’s back and forth delivery also works well too, starting with a deceptive intro that leads you to believe it’s a fairly laid back acoustic number, before powering into the main part of the song. It calms down again toward the end, leading you to think it’s over before kicking in again for one more blast of rock. That it’s taken me the best part of twelve years to appreciate the song is one thing, but the fact it still sounds just as fresh today is quite another.

MP3 Ash – Girl From Mars (expired)

Note I thought I’d come up with a rather clever title for this feature last night, but then I Googled it and discovered that MTV have a show or something with the same title. I’m going to keep the title though as I like it, and seeing as this thing has a limited life span (about four months by my calculations), it stays.