(no subject)

[miko2]

Today's Actual Song: Half Acre by Hem

Hem is a band from the New York area that falls into a sort of modern folk rock genre. (They call themselves "countrypolitan".) I've also heard them described as dreampop, and they are a band that crafts beautiful pop music, as demonstrated by their most popular song, Half Acre.

I first heard this band featured on NPR's All Songs Considered. Although I liked everything I heard, I was especially taken by a crisply played cover of the bluegrass tune The Cuckoo which was played at the end of the interview. It sounded different enough that I didn't at first realize that it was done by the same band, and I wrote to the producers of the show asking about the bluegrass song and who it was by (they replied that they didn't remember playing any bluegrass song in that segment).

In any case by the time I got their reply I'd already bought the Hem cd Rabbit Songs and had discovered for myself that my "bluegrass song" was one of the tracks on the cd. But Half Acre was clearly the best track on the cd, hands down, and has since become their most popular tune, helped in great part by it's use in a television commercial for Liberty Mutual Insurance.

You can listen to this song and others at Hem's myspace page, or watch a video featuring the Liberty Mutual Insurance commercial footage Here

Finally here's the band performing the song live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgy1rbYXj5g.