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12 by Pete Droge

Here's the drill: Twelve songs to summarize an artist's career, in chronological order. This one features...



Pete Droge was an unlikely discovery in the early 1990s Seattle music scene: a folk singer with a twang. He released three albums on major labels between 1994 and 1998, got a couple of songs on film soundtracks, made a cameo in Almost Famous, joined supergroup The Thorns, and released two albums and two EPs independently. 

Here's a primer, though I'd recommend seeing out 1996's Find a Door in its entirety. It's one of my favorite albums of all time.

(If you've got Amazon Prime, listen along here.)


1. "If You Don't Love Me (I'll Kill Myself)" (Necktie Second, 1994)
Works as both a parody of a certain type of song as well as a good example of that same type of song, namely the romantic lament.

2. "Beautiful Girl" (Songs from the Miramax Motion Picture Beautiful Girls, 1996)
This played over the credits of a movie that's definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it, if only for the amazing cast.

3. "That Ain't Right" (from Find a Door, 1996)
Find a Door is, for me, where Droge really fulfilled his "second-coming of Tom Petty" hype. The songs are tough and wise and wry, and feel like you've known them forever.

4. "Find a Door" (from Find a Door, 1996)
A brutal kiss-off in the form of a ballad: "You better find yourself a door / we sure don't need you anymore."

5. "Blindly" (from Spacey & Shakin', 1998)
Droge's third album was the requisite experimental effort where the artist explores the limits of his reach, but it also had a few "traditional" tunes like this searching ballad.

6. "Long, Sweet Summer Nights" (from The Thorns, 2003)
Droge teamed up with Shawn Mullins and Matthew Sweet in this singer-songwriter supergroup. The results were joyful, as on this celebration of romance-gone-right.

7. "Small Time Blues" (from Skywatching, 2003)
If you look closley, you can see Droge and his wife, Elaine Summers, performing an acoustic version of this in Almost Famous. Cameron Crowe included them as a tribute to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

8. "Train Love to Stay" (from Skywatching, 2003)
9. "Above It All" (from Skywatching, 2003)
Imagine an alternate reality where Skywatching were released in 1998 instead of Spacey & Shakin' and the chances become high that Droge would have scored some radio hits in that last gasp of "alternative" radio. These two would have been prime candidates.

10. "Give It All Away" (from Under the Waves, 2006)
An unconventional love song in that it celebrates its subject's daring and genrousity, rather than their beauty or sex appeal.

11. "Sad Clown" (from Volume 1, 2009)
In the late '00s and mid '10s, Droge teamed with his wife - a singer-songwriter in her own right and a constant presence on his "solo" songs - for two EPs as The Droge and Summers Blend. This handclappy trifle features Summers on lead vocals.

12. "It's Hard For You" (from Volume 2, 2014)
A lovely showcase for Droge's gift for melody.

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