D.C.’s favorite sons The Dismemberment Plan have reunited and will play a series of highly-anticipated concerts this weekend. To mark the occasion, we’ve asked members of our staff to pick their favorite Dismemberment Plan tune and write a post about it. We’ll have an entry every day for the rest of this week. Today: music editor Valerie Paschall on “The Ice of Boston.”

Virginia Beach was hardly a fertile breeding ground for cultivating an interest in independent music. Yes, Norfolk used to have a fantastic record store (R.I.P., Relative Theory) but you can’t peruse a place if you don’t know of its existence. In the early 2000s, before college radio opened the floodgates, I had select few avenues to discovering music outside of the MTV/alt-rock radio mainstream. Peer-to-peer was still nascent (and definitely not something my Dad would allow on his computer), so during high school, the only way that I could actually listen to these bands that I was hearing about from old Spin magazines and Internet friends with larger record collections was a place called “The Late Late Rock Show.”

The locally-owned-and-operated radio station may have been free of Clear Channel constraints, but its one and only indie rock/b-sides show was 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on a Saturday night — ya know, when no one is listening. But one night in 2001, I had tuned in and the DJ played “The Ice of Boston.” I could not stop giggling. I think my sister (who slept on the other side of a very thin wall) actually asked me the next morning what the hell was so funny. Travis Morrison’s self-effacing wit was a breath of fresh air from the over-earnest lyricism of the modern rock, pop-punk and jam bands to which I’d been exposed.