Hooch

"Hooch" is the trademark song of the band named Everything. The highest-charting song the band ever recorded, it received a considerable boost when it was featured in the 1998 Adam Sandler film The Waterboy. Hooch is a term sometimes used for military housing, but in this song it's clearly being used in its more common parlance as a term for cheap alcohol. Everything is from Virginia, where moonshine (hooch) is a hallowed tradition, even long after the end of Prohibition.

The first verse is about getting off work and sitting down by a fire with friends to drink the hooch. The working day was long And the road is grinding on And your body's winding down again The tribal fire's here And the circle speaks so near And the simple truth so very much clearer In the second verse, the party hits its groove and being outside with friends is feeling good. The birds and bees will sing The jams begin to ring The good vibes flow from me to you The evening turns to night The fire and moonlight The dance of all who came before The last line in the second verse ("the dance of all who came before") adds a level of depth and mystery that the song wouldn't otherwise have. It connects these campfire sessions to the history of the entire human race, presenting it as a tradition reconnecting us not to each other but to our ancestral past. Whether most fans pick up on that deeper line is unclear, because "Hooch" is also just a fun, mellow song to kick back and drink beer to.

In their early years, Everything would make a 36-hour drive from Virginia to Colorado, where they would play a series of shows for the ski crowd. "Hooch" came about on one of these trips when they developed the song as an acapella harmony which they incorporated into one of their existing songs, "Soulfish," during live performances. At this point it was just the "who got the hooch?" section. When the group got a record deal with Blackbird Records, their producer, Jim Ebert, had them flesh out "Hooch" into a full song. It was released as the first single from their Super Natural album and slowly found a following. Alas, it was their only hit, as they lost their record deal soon after. Two members of the band - lead singer Craig Honeycutt and guitarist Steve Van Dam - later started a company called Light The Music, offering educational music platforms.