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Crash Test Dummies featuring Ellen Reid — The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead (CD, video, XTC song that it covers, Wikipedia article about the song and backstory)

I’m trying to replace all of my DRMed music in iTunes. Most is available for iTunes Plus upgrades, but there are a few odd tracks that they probably don’t even have the rights for anymore, so I’m on my own for them.

This is an interesting one. Back when the movie was new (15 years ago… wow), I bought the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack. It’s a great album, featuring a lot of great bands from 1994 and a handful of great songs, including this one, that were never part of their respective bands’ full albums. The CD got scratched beyond recognition many years ago, and at some point in the various moves that one does between middle school and age 27, I lost track of it, so I ended up buying this track from iTunes a while ago.

Neither iTunes nor Amazon MP3 had this available for download, so I just bought the used CD from Amazon for $4, shipped. Used CDs are apparently worth very little, but somehow, a few massive dealers can still afford to shuffle them around for very little profit (given the cuts by Amazon, the post office, and the manufacturer of the bubble envelope, I’d be surprised if there was even $1 in profit here).

Now I have my DRM-free copy, along with the rest of the album that I had mostly forgotten about, and I’m listening to it with a great fondness for the catchy, often good, and often amusingly terrible music of 1994.