Worst Songs Ever: Train’s “Meet Virginia” and “Hey Soul Sister”

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

Train’s “Meet Virginia” and “Hey, Soul Sister”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #20 in December 1999; #3 in April 2010.

Of course I don’t think Edie Brickell and New Bohemians or the Eagles set out to write bad songs when they came up with “What I Am” and “Lyin’ Eyes,” respectively. Nor do I think Simon Le Bon wasn’t aiming for poetry when he wrote “My head is full of chopstick/I don’t like it” for “(I’m Looking For) Cracks in the Pavement.” A barren imagination or a head full of chopstick will eventually sink the sturdiest of melodies. Despite my master’s in the Bernard Sumner Graduate School of Lyric Writing, which entitles me to overlook lyrics when the instruments (in which I include vocals) got something going on, a song won’t earn an A-range grade from me if the craftsmanship exempts lyrics. Every song I’ve included in these countdown represents a failure of nerve, the lack of a talent capable of meeting the ambition (or in the case of KISS the talent capable of meeting the lack of ambition), or is boneheaded conceptually and lyrically.

It’s possible that Train’s “Meet Virginia” meets the last criterion, for it is boneheaded and a talent/ambition gap is obvious, but I don’t know if the track is devoid of courage. The band shows a fealty to its execrable ideas that borders on the monastic. A fealty and zeal. A top fifteen hit in the late nineties, “Meet Virginia” celebrates one of those scrappy Manic Pixie Girls with which men in song remain infatuated; it’s not that these women are fantasies so much as they’re described in terms that the boys would also use for their own wives and girlfriends. “She doesn’t own a dress, her hair is always a mess,” Patrick Monahan avers over tautly strummed guitar, and he thinks it’s a compliment. The arrangement is bog standard folk pop, with a vacuum-sealed production reminiscent of Jar of Clay’s “Flood” and an acoustic solo devoid of charm or punctuative value. Perhaps Train thought Monahan’s needless “oh yeah”s took care of punctuative value.

An epithalamium no doubt inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” or Beck’s recent “Nitemare Hippy Girl” “Meet Virginia” combines what Train consider homespun truths that sound like insults and bits of surrealism that sound like garbage. “Her daddy wrestles alligators/Mama works on carburetors” and “She only drinks coffee at midnight when the moment is not right/Her timing is quite unusual” — a man who graduated eighth grade wrote these lines. If “Meet Virginia” had boasted the couplet “She loves to draw cougars/She picks real big boogers, oh yeah,” it would have surprised no one and still been certified gold. A friend coined the term “performative wokeness” to describe men who preen on social media about their liberal bonafides. Passive and quietly hateful, “Meet Virginia” sounded terrible even then: Monahan isn’t Beck, whose vocal, lyric, and arrangement choices implicate himself and at least suggest he admires weirdness. Monahan’s idea of weirdness is to admire how she doesn’t Armor All her car once a month. He wants her to sink to his level of normality.

But this didn’t mark the end of Train’s career. 2001’s “Drops of Jupiter” and, unbelievably, 2009’s “Hey, Soul Sister” would raise their imbecility about women to the level of the Pythagorean theorem. Their imbecility has subtleties, though. “I said, ‘I want to write an INXS-y song. So, they started playing kind of an INXS-y song,” Monahan said about “Hey, Soul Sister.” Think about “INXS-y.” Slosh it around your mouth like a Flichman malbec. I suppose it’s progress that he can serenade this soul sister with a Mr. Mister reference.