My record collection
[317] The Portable Galaxie 500

Oddly there are two CDs that I swear I had in my collection but can’t actually find one was the original Uncollected released by Ryko from 2004, and the other was the CD compilation The Portable Galaxie 500 released by Ryko in 1998. When I realised this, I bought myself a copy of The Portable… in 2024 from Damon & Naomi along with some other stuff. I still don’t have a copy of Uncollected but hope to have one before this series ends!

The Portable Galaxie 500

If someone asked me to pick twelve Galaxie 500 tracks for a comp it could easily have been the twelve on this one. Actually someone did ask me once to pick ten and six tracks from The Portable were in my list - plus the studio version of Summertime … so pretty much 7/10 which means I was fairly close to this. Although I was asked to pick my “Top 10” which is very different from picking for a compilation.

One of the tracks that I didn’t pick for my list that did make it onto this comp was Strange which seems to have overtaken Tugboat as the Galaxie 500 song of choice - Damon collened on this in a post:

“Strange,” a track off our album On Fire, is streaming far more than any of our other songs - roughly ten times as often as the songs that surround it in its original sequence on the album (”Snowstorm” and “When Will You Come Home”).

What’s especially surprising about this is that “Strange” was not a single for Galaxie 500, and hasn’t historically been among our most popular tracks.

Damon Krukowski - International Sad Hits

Dean disagrees…

I mention that the most popular Galaxie 500 song on Spotify is “Strange” and there has been some speculation from my former bandmate Damon that this success was driven by the Spotify algorithm: “Strange” was not a single back in the day and no video was made, so why would it get to the top of the our chart now? I would counter that it should have been a single, and its popularity today is the proof. The song found its audience.

Dean Wareham newsletter October 2025

I’m inclined to agree with Damon however, possibly because Strange isn’t one of my favourite Galaxie 500 tracks and it doesn’t make a jot of sense to me that it would get streamed “roughly ten times as often” as Snowstorm or When Will You Come Home which are to my mind the most Galaxie 500 of all songs! Taking the accumulated votes of the last five years of the Galaxie 500 Mailing list survey (from 2016 to 2020) Strange came in only fifth and actually had tailed off a bit in the last couple of years.

I’m inclined to think that Spotify listeners listen to only Strange but Galaxie 500 fans are just as likely to listen to something else!

The photo on the front of the album is of the weather vane on the top of the restaurant on Brighton’s Palace Pier taken by Naomi in 1989. I took a the same photo a few years ago but sadly haven’t managed to track it down!

• Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/174
• Artist: Galaxie 500
• Title: The Portable Galaxie 500
• Packaging: Jewel case
• Format: CD
• Bought from Damon & Naomi in 2024 for $15 (plus postage)