“Lump” by The Presidents of the United States of America

"Lump" came bouncing off the self-titled 1995 debut by the Presidents of the United States of America, released by Columbia, and it's about as goofy and glorious as mid-decade alternative radio ever got. Chris Ballew wrote it, and by his own telling he was trying to write a Buzzcocks song; what came out was a three-way pile-up of Ballew's bass, Dave Dederer's guitar and Jason Finn's drums, all three of them singing, all of it moving at a sprint.

The words are stranger than they sound. Ballew has said he mixed his own history with a benign tumor in his head with a vision of a woman in a swamp, and he picked the word "lump" simply because he liked it. It counts as his favorite of all his songs. Ballew, Dederer and Conrad Uno produced it, Uno recording, with David Kahne mixing, and Roman Coppola directed the video.

It went all the way to number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks that year, and it was catchy enough to get the "Weird Al" Yankovic treatment.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.