A lot of rock music takes the plight of the working man and sells it back to him in a way that he can feel solidarity from listening to it. This is obvious with folks like John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and others, but it's prevalent in many more rock singers of their day and since. Have you ever wondered if there was a band that sang about the plight of the 1%, about not being able to buy the latest and greatest yacht every year, or having to buy a new vacation home every other year instead of every year because the working man is so tapped for cash that he can't afford to buy albums like he used to when he was a teenager?

The less said about Kid Rock, the better.

Evans Blue is that band. So, you may be wondering, why is the Music comm on dbzer0 of all places posting a song from a band like that? And the simple reason is, before they completely went to shit, Evans Blue released two very good albums with stupidly long names I still remember: The Melody and the Energetic Nature of Volume and The Pursuit Begins When This Portrayal of Life Ends. The first album gave us such hits as Cold (But I'm Still Here) and Over and Over that, if you listened to any rock radio around 2005-2006, you probably heard many times, though the album's best song was called Beg, and I will die on that hill. I do not recall if it got radio airplay or not.

The second album improved virtually everything, though it didn't do as well on the radio. It featured a song, Shine Your Cadillac, which took pot shots at the recording industry for making more money for marketing bands than the bands made for doing the actual work. It wasn't the first song of its kind, but when the record label went to the band and told them to straighten up, they did so — they unceremoniously fired their singer, who wrote the song. They even stated that he was making bad financial decisions that were threatening the band's future — in other words, the record label asked them to fire the guy who wrote that song told them to jump and they did so said "how high?".

So, the record label got their pet rock band. But, have you ever seen the movie Airheads? Where they use the question of "who was the better singer of Van Halen?" to determine if a guy was a cop or not (the opinion of the guy being, true rockers will always pick David Lee Roth, and cops will always pick Sammy Hagar, for whatever reason)? That was basically what happened with Evans Blue. If you listened to them past The Melody... and The Pursuit..., you were basically a stooge of the record label.

To be fair, their first corporate butt rock album did have two decent songs: Erase My Scars and Sick of It. These are genuinely entertaining rock songs. But they only exist because the band was told to fire their original singer because he wrote songs that made Corporate uncomfortable, and they did, without hesitation, consideration, or so much as a second thought.

The rest of Evans Blue (other members also departed over this and "other" differences) continued to release albums under the blessing and backing of their record label. I think they released four. But they just weren't selling. I'm guessing even the 1%ers weren't going out of their way to buy them, because I'd assume they generally like the same kind of music as anyone else. (No one thinks they're the bad guy.) So eventually the plug was pulled on Evans Blue, 10 years ago. A few years later, a Greatest Hits album was released (ironically, featuring none of their greatest hits from the first two albums), and again, nobody cared.

The original singer, a guy called Kevin Matisyn, went on to found a second band, Parabelle, but they never really went anywhere. He's a good singer, but it was that combination of talent that propelled that voice to the heights it reached. It's a shame the corporate record label took this band from us, but we still got two great albums.

Don't let someone else choose your voice, because when the cards are down, you can be sure they will look out for themselves before they look out for you.