Fly

There is something almost miraculously effortless about how this song operates — a guitar lick that hooks before you have decided to be hooked, a tempo that drifts rather than drives, the whole thing suspended in a kind of warm haze that refuses to resolve into urgency. The production leans into its own lightness, foregrounding space and shimmer over density or grit. McGrath's vocal here is at its most convincingly carefree, the delivery so easy it almost conceals the craft underneath. The lyric floats above its ostensible subject — freedom, escape, the refusal of weight — rather than examining it closely, and that distance is exactly right for what the song is trying to do. This is music that made Sugar Ray inescapable for a summer, played from car stereos and pool decks and the tinny speakers of portable radios, and it carries that particular memory of the late 1990s mainstream: polished, sun-drenched, aggressively uncomplicated. It belongs to the daytime and to movement, to the feeling of being in transit between something that ended and something that has not started yet. There is no tension in it, and that absence of tension is precisely what it offers.