Songs no one else remembers: Angie Aparo - "Spaceship"
Thanks for the reminder, Corner Bakery
I have this Spotify playlist that I add to when I randomly remember a song that I’m pretty sure is fully unique to my youth and mine alone. Not the beloved one-hit wonders from the ‘90s that everyone else knows too, but completely random, not-that-popular songs that just happened to enter my airspace at some point for one reason or another.
The first track is “Spaceship” by Angie Aparo. Sometime around late 1999 or early 2000, which for me was eighth grade, I committed the cardinal Online Safety sin of submitting my real name and address to a website in exchange for some kind of “street team” program with a record company. My mom was pissed, even though I’d already been regularly engaged in the habit of oversharing personal details online for years at this point. But the website promised CDs, stickers and other forms of middle-school-girl kryptonite in exchange for promoting whatever bands they were apparently trying to hype up among my demographic. This should have 100% been a scam, but it was a more innocent time. I got a CD in the mail with “Spaceship” on it and promptly spread the good news to absolutely no one.
I don’t remember what other songs were on the compilation CD, so I guess I must have liked this one the best. It wasn’t necessarily the musical style I would typically go for, but I enjoyed the vaguest anti-capitalist lyrics (“It was a holiday for the underpaid / Everybody got a haircut and lemonade / And they smiled just like it was their father”) and the production was catchy. I remember listening to it a lot on my Girl Scout bus trip to New York City, which - although that trip happened more than a full year before 9/11 - is kind of caught up in my personal memories of 9/11 and what New York looked like to me at that time. Also, the cover of Aparo’s album The American is kind of eerie in that context too.
Here are several wild things I learned about Angie Aparo while writing this:
It’s the name of the guy, not a band, which was a long-time misunderstanding on my part.
Both Faith Hill and Tim McGraw covered his songs. “Cry,” which was a pretty significant Faith Hill hit, is an Angie Aparo cover!!
He had a series of strokes a few years ago and forgot his own songs. Imagine forgetting a song you wrote that Faith Hill covered!! Fortunately, he has made a full recovery and is back to recording and performing.
All of this is to say that I stopped at Corner Bakery, a Panera-esque chain restaurant near my house, for lunch the other day. It was warmish outside, and they were blaring some millennial nostalgia Pandora station for the few customers on the patio. As I went to go inside, I had to stop for a second and listen - could it be? why were they playing - because who else could possibly know this song? Yep, it was “Spaceship.”