Fiddle and Violins: H.C.M. (Violin Cadenza) / Pushin' the Button

Tiny Lights: H.C.M. (Violin Cadenza)
Tiny Lights: Pushin' the Button

[purchase]

I remember the moment I fell in love with Hoboken's Tiny Lights, even if I no longer remember the exact date. It was somewhere around April 1990 and they were opening for Throwing Muses at the campus center at Rutgers' Cook College in New Brunswick, N.J. Lead vocalist Donna Croughn was wailing away on her electric violin on what I later came to know as "H.C.M. (Violin Cadenza)" and my mind was suitable blown.

I have a feeling you had to be there to really get this track and it's other half, "Pushin' the Button", but if you were there, you know how much fun a Tiny Lights show was. And after that first show, I was there whenever they were in town. Which was quite often back in the early '90s, when it seemed like they played the Court Tavern every couple of months.

Both of these tracks come from the album Hot Chocolate Massage, an album recoded hastily and on the cheap after what should have been their Enigma Records debut got lost when the record label reorganized just before the album's release date. The band never really recovered from that bit of bad luck, and after several more indie releases, finally called it quits in the late '90s. Guitarist John Hamilton, who also shared lead vocal duties on "Pushin' the Button", is now a professor of comparative literature, at Harvard. Not a bad consolation career.