Plain White T’s is the young emo-punk-pop-lite band who hit it big last year with the frustratingly undeniable acoustic ballad “Hey There Delilah.” I opened for them last year at the Ottawa Bluesfest, and their audience was full of 12-to-15-year-old girls, who eagerly mouthed every word of their songs by heart. It was, as they say, made of awesome.
I’m sure it was (made) painfully clear to the band how useful another “Delilah” would be for their follow-up album, and damn if they haven’t hit it out of the park — with the Beatlesque “1 2 3 4.” Curse you, Silly Pop Song, for burrowing into my brain so!
The lyrics are as vapid as bottom-of-the-bag cheesepuff-dust, but oh, that chorus.
There’s only
1 thing 2 do
3 words 4 you
I love you
There’s only
1 way 2 say
those 3 words
And that’s what I’ll do
I love you.
So simple — the stuff of high school yearbooks and text-messages — you wonder why no one thought of it before. Paul McCartney in 1965 would have killed for that chorus. A line stretching back to the casually tossed-off wordplay of Cole Porter and George Gershwin.
Durned kids. Get off my lawn.
