It's New to Me: She's About to Cross My Mind by the Red Button (2007)

Illustration from the cover of The Hotspur comic book issue #744, February 1951

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure where I first heard about the Red Button and their 2007 power-pop album She's About to Cross My Mind. I thought I saw it on Bruce Borack's list of 200 Essential Power Pop Albums, but I just checked and it's not there. It's probably too recent. I may have seen it on the fan-selected list of Top 200 Power Pop Albums on the Shake Some Action Revisited blog. Wherever it was that I saw it, the name stuck with me, though, and I grabbed a copy of the CD on Record Store Day as part of a big sale that was going on.

So, yeah - this album sounds A LOT like the Beatles. The Red Button is a collaboration between Seth Swirsky and Mike Ruekberg, two LA-area songwriters who apparently decided to make an album of the best Lennon/McCartney imitations they could come up with. And they actually pull it off pretty well. On first listen, it's hard not to groan a little at the Beatles for Sale-era sound (with the addition of some Magical Mystery Tour backward guitar) on the opening track and single "Cruel Girl". Where that song apes Lennon, the second song - the album's title track - is a bouncy number that is pure McCartney. The funny thing, though, is that, by the third song, I wasn't tracking the Beatles sound-alike elements anymore. They're there in abundance - every song on here is soaked in late-'60s pop nostalgia - but the songwriting is good enough that the material has a lot of appeal beyond that nostalgia.

Also, it helps that some of the material on She's About to Cross My Mind is filtered through a more recent set of power-pop influences. On certain tracks, the Red Button reminds me of artists like the Pernice Brothers, Matthew Sweet, and Oranger. So it's thoroughly derivative, but that's never a critical issue with power-pop - the key is that the songs have the right sound without losing the ability to catch the ear with some original hooks. And if you're into that kind of thing, then this album is definitely the kind of thing you might be into.

"Hopes Up" by the Red Button