You know how sometimes you just suddenly remember a band you were crazy into but you haven't thought about in years? When I lived in Boston back in 99, I was really into this two-woman group called Mr. Airplane Man. I must've seen them play like twenty times in a year. Those ladies could fucking rip it up. Just a drummer and a guitarist, they made this tremendously loud swampy blues noise (they opened for R.L. Burnside once) that really hit me somewhere important. They did for me what the White Stripes did for everyone else a few years later.

But then I moved here and, gradually, I forgot all about them. And then today, maybe because I was writing about my home state over on Slog, I suddenly remembered them. I Googled them, only to discover that, though the band doesn't seem to be around anymore due to geographic problems, the lead singer has started a solo act under the name Margaret Airplane Man. The drummer plays for The Turpentine Brothers, in New Mexico, now.

At the end, Mr. Airplane Man started flirting with garage pop, as in this great Outsiders cover:

And it sounds like both members of the band are still playing with that same sound in different parts of the country. The Turpentine Brothers are louder and more noise-centric, and Margaret Airplane Man is doing more bluesy stuff. If I have to choose, my heart goes with Margaret, if just because I've never heard a snarl like hers on a female singer, and it completely melts me.

I don't know what people used to do before Google—would they just forget about bands like this and never be able to hear them again?—but it seems so wonderfully, beautifully overwhelming to be able to keep track of musicians like this, after ten years. It's at once thrilling and sad, and I don't know if there's exactly a word for it, besides "grateful."