Sick of Myself

In this nihilistic song, Matthew Sweet is so out-of-sorts over a girl, he's made himself sick. The world may be ugly and a lie, but she's beautiful and true, and it's driving him mad. Sweet has admitted that many of his songs are personal, but they're not necessarily a plea for help.

This was Matthew Sweet's biggest hit, earning airplay on rock radio alongside the likes of Soundgarden and Collective Soul. He was 31 and well into his career when the song reached its chart peak in 1995. After making a name for himself in the Athens, Georgia music scene, he got a deal with Columbia Records and release his first album in 1986. His follow-up came in 1989, but neither charted and the label dropped him. Zoo Records issued his breakthrough, Girlfriend, in 1991 after a tumultuous time when he went through a divorce and lost his record collection to flood damage.

Richard Lloyd, founder of the exalted New York City band Television, played guitar on this track. Sweet and Lloyd crossed paths in the '80s when they played together in a band called the Golden Palominos. Lloyd played on three songs from Sweet's 1989 album Earth, and contributed to his subsequent albums up to and including 100% Fun. In a Songfacts interview with Richard Lloyd, he said: "Matthew used to fly me in and he would send me demos like a week before. I'd listen to them through and then I would get there and they would have new songs or different songs. Some songs he would just throw at me, and depending upon the emotion in the song itself, that would lend itself to a certain kind of playing, and 'Sick Of Myself' had that kind of angst in it, so I tried to portray that."