lately re-enjoying a favorite of my youth, the Shoes, a sublime power-pop band from Zion, Illinois. Someone gave me a copy of their 1979 major label debut "Present Tense" back then (finding it insufficiently "new wave", a exileable offense at the time) & I've loved it ever since...(harmonies and gently layered distorted guitars/sweet but with crunch, like Nutella on a Rye-Krisp)---another point of view:


"Shoes brief flirtation with major label recording and major-league success was the period during which I encountered them, and during which I wrote them my first, barely literate, fan letter, the first (and one of very few) I ever wrote. I received a hand-written response from a friend of the band on shoe-themed stationery, pretty heady business for a quiet kid in a small town. (A recent scan of boxes of old crap failed to turn up said letter, but I found an alarming amount of other Shoes-themed material, including a valentine from 1983; not one, but two, fan club membership cards; and my own writing, ennobled today by the euphemistic term fan-fic, but which I would never have dreamed of showing to another soul.)"


video for Too Late (pretty cute for sure!) & everything's in print at their website...