I think I’m going through a little Pixies withdrawal today, after an entire week of them last week! I had a lot of fun with that — please feel free to suggest other occasions that might warrant a future full week for a particular artist, and if it’s someone I like enough, it just might happen at some point.

But while Pixies Week was in full swing, the world kept on spinnin’ round, hard as it might be to believe. And during one of those spins, as I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, the world lost Steve Jobs, creative/technological/entrepreneurial genius extraordinaire. Of course, enough has been said about him that there’s nothing I can say here that would be of much interest, really. But I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to dedicate today’s song to him anyway…

And what better band to dedicate to Steve Jobs than the Apples in Stereo? Since 1995, Robert Schneider and cohorts have created some of the most effervescent pop-rock concoctions this side of the Archies (and even better, they’re not a cartoon band). They were founding members of the Elephant 6 Collective/Recording Company, which also included such great bands — and past and future Reselect.com selections — as Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, Beulah, Of Montreal, Dressy Bessy, and The Minders. Major commercial success has eluded them (which seems to be the case for most Elephant 6 bands), but creatively, there are few better power-pop songwriters than Schneider.

In 2000, The Apples in Stereo released The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone [sic] [which mean’s “that’s the way they spelled it, don’t blame me for a typo”], an album that brought them back to Revolver-era, Beatlesque sounds after a foray into more experimentalism on Her Wallpaper Reverie. One of the best songs on Discovery of a World was “The Rainbow,” a supremely catch song that many songwriters would kill to be able to call theirs, but which Schneider seems to be able to practically write in his sleep. A couple listens to “The Rainbow” and you’re very likely to find it popping up in your head throughout the rest of the day. The lyrics bring us back to the dedication of this post to Steve Jobs, as they reflect on the ephemeral nature of people and their perceptions.

These lyrics sum it all up best:

Baby don’t you know
People come and go
Ooh, just like the rainbow