Sometimes, during those long, dark, nights of the soul that occur at 4am, I try to trick myself into sleepiness by attempting to answer tedious questions.

Most recently, I’ve been trying a new angle on an old favourite: is the question “is guitar music dead” dead?

The answer is probably, no, because that very topic is filling a hundred hard-to-schedule panels at a hundred music biz conferences, and until the new rolly-eye topic du jour emerges, it’ll continue to be trotted out ad nauseum.

Even when overlooking the inanity of the question’s fundamental nature, it doesn’t make any sense anyway, especially when bands like Captain Casanova exist.

Captain Casanova // If You Come Around Here

Not that they’re the new Beatles or anything (though they are good), or that they have invented a new guitar sound or anything (seriously, if there are any legitimate new sounds to be hauled from a six-stringed instrument, Thurston Moore wants to hear from you).

It’s just that songs like If You Come Around Here continue a great tradition of jangly pop songs that exude  almost all their charms via the guitar.

It’s a great song, and one that will get crowds bobbing wherever they play it. And maybe that’s what guitar music is now: a well-honed device, an understood means to a very desirable end. That’s good enough for me.

MORE: captaincasanova.com