Shady Lane

On Brighten the Corners the track is listed as Shady Lane / J vs. S. It opens with Malkmus and a repeating guitar line before the band comes in, and after the second chorus the song gives way to the instrumental J vs. S. The five-piece band recorded it in Winston-Salem in July 1996. For the single, the Krossfader edit shortened the gap between the first chorus and second verse and dropped the coda. Its B-sides were spread across a 7-inch and two CDs, among them Slowly Typed, a faster, country-tinged take on the album's Type Slowly.

It reached 40 in the UK, their first Top 40 single there, though Jim Connelly wrote that in the US it went nowhere. Spike Jonze directed the video, whose central image is a headless Malkmus. Fluxblog heard a gentle, hypnotic melody that keeps slipping off the beat, and NPR's Sami Yenigun found it hard to judge whether the lines were sincere or sarcastic.

Live

Pavement first played it in Dallas on 8 February 1996 and have played it more than 250 times since, most recently at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in July 2026. A 1997 performance is on Live Europaturnen MCMXCVII. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official video, directed by Spike Jonze, which runs shorter than the album track.