Glittering Jewels & Beating Drums: an Ode to a Deep Cut
Every music fan has at least one: that elusive song that no matter how many concerts you’ve been to, you’ve never heard your favorite band or artist play live. Whether it’s a little-known B-side, an overlooked album track, or a notorious deep cut, it never shows up on the set list. Each time you walk into a venue to hear your band, a tiny part of you hopes tonight is the night they’ll play “that song.”
Mine, until recently, was World’s On Fire: the oddball studio cut on a live acoustic EP Hanson put out in 2009 called Stand Up, Stand Up. It’s a great EP, but to this day I can’t fathom why the band would hide what I consider to be one of their best songs on such an obscure release.
Sonically, I love World’s On Fire for its thumping, driving drumbeat; its simple, hook-y electric guitar riffs; the rumbling piano chords on the verses; and its singalong-friendly chorus (almost shouted, but still in harmony, because this is Hanson).
Lyrically, this is a song with a message. It’s about standing up for what you believe in when it seems like the rest of the world is abandoning everything that matters. There is a palpable sense of frustration in the lyrics and the vocals: “why doesn’t everyone else CARE?” In a clever turn of songwriting, Hanson convey passion and urgency with words that are vague enough to resonate in the context of any issue or cause: World’s On Fire is an anthem to inspire action, wherever and whenever action is desperately needed. When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election and incredulous New Yorkers covered a subway station with Post-It notes displaying messages of resistance, I contributed lyrics from World’s on Fire: “Stand up, stand up.”
Until the beginning of this year, I’d been to a couple dozen Hanson concerts but never heard them play World’s on Fire. They opened with it every night on a tour in late 2009, but I wasn’t in any of those audiences. After that, Hanson seemed to put the song “in the vault” like a dated Disney movie. In 2015, they unexpectedly played it during a concert in Chicago that was being broadcast via livestream — seemingly without rehearsing it, and kind of butchering it as a result (chords were flubbed; lyrics were forgotten; but some of us were so surprised and delighted to hear it that we gave them a pass for the sloppy execution).
Fast forward three more years to Hanson’s 2018 Back to the Island retreat in Jamaica, where inclement weather not only forced the postponement of the opening night concert but also required moving the show from an outdoor venue to an indoor one. The stage was low, the room was hot, and the sound was…not perfect. It was shaping up to be a show that I’d remember only as “that time Hanson played in a stuffy greenhouse-thing in Jamaica.”
Until I recognized the first bar of that thumping, driving drumbeat.
Hearing my favorite songs live always triggers a surge of happiness (Dopamine? Serotonin? Both?), but hearing World’s On Fire multiplied that sensation by a power of ten and spiked it with adrenaline. Maybe it was because I was at the show that night with a dear friend who shares my fierce love for this particular song. Maybe it was because in that moment it felt like our favorite band was giving us a rare gift to remember.
Or maybe it was because when Hanson play that song, it reminds us that they’ve experienced that same unsettling blend of exasperation and disbelief that’s becoming increasingly familiar to so many of us in this day and age: they know that the world’s on fire.
