Sensational '70's Tune for Thursday, May 21st, '09

An impressionable child in the summer of 1976 might have come to the conclusion that Starbuck's "Moonlight Feels Right" had been created in outer space by aliens who had been studying the conventions of mid-'70s AM radio pop but had gotten many of the details slightly but tellingly wrong. (Seriously, a pop song with an extended marimba solo??) Everything about this song is just a little bit odd, from the hermetically-sealed sound of the pristine and largely electronic production to the ostentatiously tossed off chuckle Bruce Blackman uses to punctuate every chorus to the nagging synth hook that's the song's most distinctive feature. The song is so profoundly weird that it's remarkable that it wasn't intended as a novelty, but as a sexy evocation of summertime lust.