My Top 1000 Songs #636: Just Can't Get Enough

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

A lot of songs conjure up vivid high school memories, for better and worse. But Vince Clarke can conjure it with his keyboard tone alone--first on Depeche Mode's debut, then with Yaz (or Yazoo for you Brits). (Though by the time he'd moved over to Erasure I'd kinda aged out.)

While most Depeche Mode fans prefer later albums, when singer Martin Gore moved them in a darker direction, I'm still a sucker for 1981's Speak & Spell, Clarke's lone LP with the band. And "Just Can't Get Enough" in particular is a track forever fixed in time. I wasn't even a fan of the band then--I was still mostly in classic rock mode, with occasional ventures into punk and new wave--and probably just heard the song on the radio or at a party or a school dance, never even picked up the album. And, yeah, it's pretty damn repetitive, more a dance track than a song you want to hang out and listen to from beginning to end. But it stuck in my head, and even today hearing that introductory keyboard riff makes me feel like I'm 15 again. Not sure if that's a good thing, but it's a thing.

On TV:

Live:

Oh, hey, they even did it on Glee...