Spotlight

This song was written ten years too early. It's one of the few times in their career that Sixpence actually followed a trope of Christian rock -- they wrote a song about how you shouldn't worship them, you should worship God instead. This almost always rings false, especially if it's being said/sung by Christian bands playing huge arenas with big light shows, so Sixpence may have done right by pre-empting their fame. Then again, I have never once seen Matt Slocum, a true shoegazer if ever there was one, look at the audience during a Sixpence show. He doesn't strike me as a guy who's up there to bask in his own glory -- he's too busy getting the digital delay just right. Which he does masterfully on this recording, by the way. The main riff for "Spotlight" is a clean, nimble hook straight from the Johnny Marr playbook, and guitar work like it almost disappears from Sixpence's recorded ouevre until "Love" from the self-titled album. (Feel free to disagree -- perhaps J.J. Plasencio's delicious bass intro on "Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death" picks up this thread sooner.)

"Spotlight, get me out of this spotlight," Bingham sings. "It looked OK but somehow it doesn't feel right." Well, it doesn't feel right for her to be singing that in 1993, anyway. To the best of my knowledge, Sixpence has rarely, if ever, performed this song, but it would have been all the more appropriate post-"Kiss Me."

EDIT: By the way, I just noticed that "Spotlight" is the only song on The Fatherless and the Widow that wasn't written by Matt Slocum -- it was written by T.J. Behling, who may have been a member of Sixpence at a very early stage. My history on this point is a bit fuzzy.