Welcome to On Tape, CHIRP's weekly exploration of Chicago music in films, videos, and beyond. Each week, our editors will reach back into the archives for the interviews, music videos, live concert appearances, and found footage of the city's most important musical icons. This week: Smith Westerns.
In ten years, how will you remember the Smith Westerns? Maybe you'll clock them the way most people did upon the announcement of their breakup last month: as another promising Chicago indie-pop band who flirted with greatness before going poof in the bargain bin. Maybe you'll remember the time you saw them at Schubas and the drinks were good and the photo booth was working and you and the person you loved felt as young as the guys on stage and snapped four pictures that, if you looked hard enough, you could probably find, pressed hard up against some words inside a novel you never finished reading. Maybe you'll remember a mix that began with "Weekend" and only got better from there, the one you almost wore out at the beach, or on the train, or during that one summer you took up running.
Maybe you won't remember them.
Maybe the solo project alluded to by frontman Collin Omori in a recent interview with the Reader will bear fruit, and you'll think about them even more.
Maybe it won't.
Maybe, before ten years even gets here, you'll listen to "Weekend" one more time, preferably on the radio of a car headed nowhere in particular during a month when things are green. Maybe you'll listen to it twice.