Creeping Jenny - Thursday Morning Lift (1996)
Artist: Creeping Jenny
Author: Sarah
Date: 01/12/2026
Listen: Youtube
Over the past couple years, Creeping Jenny has slowly amassed a small but devoted (and growing) following among the community of indiepop nerds. On Thursday Morning Lift it's not hard to see why; it's catchy, the synths are pretty cute, and best of all (from a cult appeal perspective) it's only 15 minutes long. The thing that is odd, however, is that it doesn't really sound like anything else in indiepop.
It's not that Thursday Morning Lift has a totally unprecedented sound or anything; I actually could point you to artists that it makes me immediately think of. The thing is that those artists are minimal synth groups like Solid Space or Oppenheimer Analysis, just pop-ified. You can really hear that best in the middle of this EP, where they cut back on the pop and get a bit science-fictiony. Sarah Frank compares herself to a robot and follows it up with a half-spoken song about a rocket trip; these songs aren't without their charms, but the strengths of Creeping Jenny really do lie in the pop songs.
"Second Hand" is my personal favorite here, mostly for the way she manages to fold some fairly unwieldy lyrics, at least by indiepop standards, into something memorable ("you used to sew butterflies on everything, then you moved on to snakes" as an opening line probably shouldn't work as well as it does, and "I can count on one hand the number of nights I've spent in this bed even though it's mine" really shouldn't work as a chorus). We're not at like Manic Street Preachers levels of "how did you make a song out of that" here obviously, but I'm still a bit impressed, personally.
"Living a Girl's Adventure Tale" isn't quite as good, but honestly that's the one title that's going to make sure this sticks with me for years, I just absolutely adore it. "Too Late for Sandals, Too Early for Boots" is probably the most straightforwardly poppy song here; the "you're not in love with me yet" refrain is the most traditionally catchy thing here (and my favorite moment on the EP).
Unfortunately, the big problem with a microcanon is that, no matter how much you wish it were otherwise, there's just not much of it to go around. Creeping Jenny would go on to put the first two songs of Thursday Morning Lift on a 7" single (released by a label this time!), but after that they just faded away, waiting for eventual rediscovery. If we can take the songs at their word, Sarah Frank had two complaints at the age of 23: that we're not in love with her yet, and that she's not a part of our set. For Creeping Jenny as a whole, that latter point is still true to this day, but ironically that's the exact reason that more and more of us are falling in love with them.