Yesterday the fitness instructor for our apartment building said she’d grown weary of the Spotify playlist she’d cued up for the past few sessions. Nominally “Tom Petty,” the list, liberally, blared hits from the likes of Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and other mainstream popsters. When she asked for suggestions of a new list, I hesitated, but then figured The Weakerthans might be a good segue. And I was right.
Spotify’s algorithm for Petty calculated that Hall & Oates’s “Maneater” belonged in the same batch as “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” my favorite Petty tune.1 To my surprise, during the half dozen Weakerthans songs to which we stretched (our strength-building having been performed during the first, mm…, stretch): no such mismatched filler. Further surprise came when the playlist contained not one but both of the band’s two songs sung from the point of view of a cat.
The cat’s name is Virtute (veer-too-tay), Latin, lifted from the motto of the band’s hometown Winnipeg: Unum cum virtute multorum (One with the strength of many). Thus the motto speaks of solidarity, which I discussed seven years ago this month, also in the context of The Weakerthans. I’ll say no more as you listen to the songs in question.
After revisiting these on YouTube last night, I added the following comment to the second song:
Today our fitness instructor said the Tom Petty Spotify playlist we’d exercised to for weeks had served its purpose. I suggested Weakerthans. Strangely no other artists butted in. Two Virtute songs played and I was glad I couldn’t really make out their lyrics, tho’ I know them well, because I would have been a puddle in my bent over row.
If you read the other listeners’ comments, you’ll notice that, to quote producer Ivo Watts-Russell of This Mortal Coil, “It’ll end in tears.”2
On his second solo album, Winter Wheat, Weakerthans vocalist and lyricist John K. Samson included two more songs involving Virtute, but I’ve waited nine years to hear them. I’ll probably wait a few months more.
