source: FanPop.com

Throwback time. Don't laugh too hard now ... I was talking to a friend the other night and I slipped into one of my "bad" habits of quoting or referencing song lyrics in conversation. In this particular case, it was the M2M song "The Day You Went Away." My friend had never heard of M2M or their awful debut single "Don't Say You Love Me," so I felt I had to educate him.

I actually came to really like them while I was last (last) abroad in Taiwan, in 2000. For some reason, they were pretty popular in Taiwan at the time and their music videos were on all the time. Craving some English-language music in my life, I went out to Rose, a record store in Taipei (that still exists!), and picked up their album "Shades of Purple."

Their voices are and always have been almost painfully high to me, but once I was able to overlook that, I found their lyrics (they apparently wrote their own songs) very good for girls in their mid-to-late teens, whose first language wasn't even English (the two members of M2M are Norwegian). The music is pretty much pure pop, in the best ways possible.

I remember when I was a bit older, they came out with a second album and a fresh, sultrier image. I did get a copy of that album and enjoyed it, though not as much as I did the first album. They disbanded at some point while I was in college, and I really haven't given them much thought until now. Well, I went back and listened to some of my favorite songs from back then (and was surprised to find I could recall many, many of the lyrics and melodies) and I still think they are as good as I did then. In fact, I'm pretty sure I think the songs are better than I thought they were back then, because when I was in my teens, I wasn't considering how difficult it is to write a song, how amazing it is to have words flow so fluidly. What I cared about when I was in my teens was how much I could relate to a song, how much a song reminded me of the boy I liked.

Well, if you don't mind squeaky high voices, or if you are due for another dose of nostalgia, here are some of my favorite songs of theirs.