Wrong number/right lover

True to form, all it took was for me to post my phone songs post and another one that would have rocketed into that top 8 suddenly appeared on my radar. My friend Jason read the post and it immediately reminded him of an obscure phone song from 1990 - Alisha's "Wrong Number." You can't find it anywhere for sale (digitally) on the entire internet. No iTunes, no AmazonMP3, no nothing. The only way you can purchase it is to go to Amazon and pay through the nose for the vinyl maxi-single (or, alternately, pay slightly less for the cassingle.) But for that price, you could hear all about how Alisha thinks she's calling her friend but somehow or another has dialed the wrong number and gets connected to a sexy sounding guy's answering machine. She's overcome with lust which leads her to sing "I've got the wrong number but my heart keeps telling me/I've got the right lover now."

I have to admit that I had never heard of this song before - I wonder how it charted or if it even charted? Well, all I know is that if I had known this song existed in 1990, I would have been all over it, played on continual repeat on my Walkman while I roamed the Iowa State campus. Sounding a lot like another one-named artist of the same time period that's been mentioned on these pages a couple of times, it would have been impossible for me to ignore it. AND it's a phone song so by default, it's worth at least one listen. What's even better is that it's full of phone sounds, be it phones ringing, dial tones, the "hang-up-now-or-else" sound that will more than likely be a thing of the past before too much longer.

It would be easy to dismiss "Wrong Number" as pop fluff, and well, it IS pop fluff, but it's not like that's a bad thing. As was posted by MrDiscoPop this morning, writing an effective pop song is not nearly as easy as some people think. There are so many that don't work, that when one does (and I would argue that "Wrong Number" works), it hits that spot that causes you to just keep repeating the song over and over again. Don't punish a song because it has slick production and no weighty social issue as its topic. Sometimes, we just need to let go, and for most, that needs to happen more often than it does.

I've gone on record as saying that this has been the best summer for music in so long. Songs like this, while not current, add to the fabric of the summer and fit in just as well as Kylie and Scissor Sisters and Goldfrapp. I only wish I could find a YouTube clip of "Wrong Number" - it's so worthy and no one has done it! I would post a link to the mp3 but I'm so not interested in getting my almost 7 year old blog shut down over it!