Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” is up there for me as one of the better pop love songs of all-time for the sole reason that it came at a pretty formative point in my life. Whether you want to call it my band boy phase or something else a little less accusatory (although boy band phase is 100% accurate) I spent the larger part of my pre-teens listening to the “Hot Nine at 9” on Bay Area local radio station Z95.7 and geeking out on all the great pop songs of that era. “Truly Madly Deeply” was a fixture on that segment for a long stretch of time. My friends and I would actually trade tapes from these sessions believe it or not– one of us would stay up and record the entire session by inserting a cassette tape into the cassette deck of the boombox and pressing record when the songs would come on the radio. It was the earliest form of piracy I would take part in, which is even stranger when you consider the fact that I would start using Napster to download digital songs off the internet a mere three years after that process. It’s almost disorienting to think of how quickly technology was changing in that era– to go from cassette tapes to digital downloads in a span of three years is pretty wild in retrospect, a real massive sea change in the music industry that would transform the way people consumed music forever. There probably are some parallels to how rapidly AI is shifting the tech landscape in recent years, and much like music in the late 90’s, once that genie is out of the bottle it’s clear that it ain’t ever going back in.
Standout Songs: “Truly Madly Deeply”, “I Want You”, “To the Moon & Back”
