{"id":3569245,"uri":"https://api.kexp.org/v2/plays/3569245/?format=json","airdate":"2025-10-24T06:31:52-07:00","show":64917,"show_uri":"https://api.kexp.org/v2/shows/64917/?format=json","image_uri":"https://ia801809.us.archive.org/3/items/mbid-603455d0-d7a2-4d4c-bbd4-a6dc99bce1cb/mbid-603455d0-d7a2-4d4c-bbd4-a6dc99bce1cb-22077085683_thumb500.jpg","thumbnail_uri":"https://dn721902.ca.archive.org/0/items/mbid-603455d0-d7a2-4d4c-bbd4-a6dc99bce1cb/mbid-603455d0-d7a2-4d4c-bbd4-a6dc99bce1cb-22077085683_thumb250.jpg","song":"Can't Hardly Wait","track_id":"e4cedefe-d632-3ef4-b195-3771329cf81a","recording_id":"908dd7d1-3fb7-450f-ae8b-d81f7aca4ec9","artist":"The Replacements","artist_ids":["dc0d05ce-2f47-4962-b4fa-8631a0a51987"],"album":"Pleased to Meet Me","release_id":"5248e69d-7159-357a-87ba-33bd4ddac984","release_group_id":"dc5f823b-976f-3ef5-86a7-d443966d212b","labels":["Rhino"],"label_ids":["c4f2cf49-b57c-4cc1-8061-f54400704ac4"],"release_date":"2008-10-06","rotation_status":null,"is_local":false,"is_request":false,"is_live":false,"comment":"Can't Hardly Wait\" mutated from an obvious suicide song to a more opaque and less controversial one.\n\nReplacements frontman Paul Westerberg wrote it after completing recording sessions for the band's third studio album, Let It Be (1984). That version, recorded for their fourth album, Tim (1985), but left off the tracklist, is unambiguously about a guy driving to a water tower to kill himself. It mentions someone else abandoning him (\"I'll be sad in heaven, you won't follow me there\"), but is otherwise a clearcut meditation on his own chaotic life and his desire to end it.\n\nBy the time the song was finally released on their next album, Pleased To Meet Me (1987), Westerberg obfuscated the suicide aspect to the point that it was impossible to detect. In the new version, the lyrics are directed outward to some unnamed person to whom Westerberg is writing a letter. The thing that Westerberg \"can't hardly wait\" for is to get home and go to sleep. Knowing the song's origin, we can frame \"sleep\" as death, but even then the rest of the lyrics don't make much sense.  https://tinyurl.com/3hxt9j6x","location":1,"location_name":"Default","play_type":"trackplay"}