Song of the Day: Bliss 66, "Not Quite Paradise"

As someone who long ago decided that pop music was going to be his primary means of cultural expression, there rarely exists a moment when I do not have some snatch of a tune running on a loop in my head. Some of these are about routine: Typically the first song careening through my grey matter when I first rise is Biggie Smalls' "Warning," specifically because I set my alarm clock to 5:46 AM (though no one is ever paging me at that hour). Other times they show up as an emotional reaction. Lately, I've been running through some phrases of a metal song of my own making called "Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive" that more or less sums up my feelings about Drumpf's America. 

These bits of background sound tend to be welcome, as they act as motivational screeds and/or coping mechanisms. But sometimes they seem to exist solely for torment. There's an emo song I've been chasing for years that definitely contains the lyric, "To my friends/I am sorry/I am gone," and I have not been able to track it down despite a lot of insane virtual crate-digging. 

Then there's Bliss 66, a band I know pretty much nothing about but whose song "Not Quite Paradise" has an opening salvo that goes, "Took the path of least resistance/Into the great unknown/No directory assistance." That painfully banal series of lines had been bouncing around up there for a little while, and it was relatively easy to track down with a simple Google search. But the thing that bothers me about it is the context: I have no idea how or why I would have heard "Not Quite Paradise." It arrived as the lead single on Bliss 66's debut album Trip to the 13th in June 2001, and the tune's main claim to fame is that it was included on the soundtrack to the little seen animated feature Titan A.E. (which was released in theaters in June 2000). I have never seen that movie, nor does the image of the album's cover trigger any memories. It was never in rotation on MTV, I was not listening to the radio at the time (and even if I was, I probably would not have heard it—it wasn't much of a hit, even on modern rock radio), and a cursory look at some of the mixes I made myself during that time (some of which are admittedly lost to history) doesn't point to its being on my radar. It was also released before I started working in magazines—as of late 2001, I had access to endless promo CDs, so there are a handful of totally forgotten records from that period that have still stuck with me, particularly never-was rap-metal misfits Bionic Jive's Armageddon Through Your Speaker. I'm fairly certain Bliss 66 didn't sneak into that cavalcade of mediocrity either, though clearly I not only was exposed to "Not Quite Paradise" but also listened to it enough to log its opening lyric in the permanent files.

TL, DR: I don't understand my own brain and this is a very middling song that has somehow survived 15 years of binging and purging. Sometimes the survivors are illogical.