Left of the Dial

Westerberg had the riff and the title in 1983, and the rest of the lyric came within a couple of days of meeting Lynn Blakey of Let's Active, when the two bands shared a bill. Blakey remembered him following her around and bumming her cigarettes. The title points to college radio, whose stations sat at the left end of the FM dial, and Westerberg told of hearing her voice on the radio for about a minute, the first time in six months, before the station faded out. Blakey died in February 2026, and INDY Week called the song her most famous inspiration.

It was cut for Tim at Nicollet Studios in 1985, with Alex Chilton singing alongside the band. Jim Connelly, citing Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys, hears loud and quiet dynamics taken from the Who, an approach Westerberg aimed for across the second side of the album. It was never a single, but a promo video was made. Rolling Stone placed it at 265 among the 500 greatest songs of all time in 2021, and at 24 among the best songs of the 1980s in 2023.

Live

setlist.fm logs it 202 times, the band's fifth most played song, from the Uptown Bar in Minneapolis in January 1985 to the final reunion show in Porto in June 2015, where it followed a cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart. A version from Maxwell's in 1986 is on For Sale. Ed Stasium's new mix was the first preview of the 2023 Tim box, and a 2001 tribute album took the song's name. The upload in the hypersongs web is the 1985 promo video.