Often there’s no rhyme nor reason as to why some songs become hits and others not. Take the band Fun, best known for the fairly poppy We Are Young (a massive US #1 hit) as well as the far more interesting Some Nights (US #3), complete with its schizophrenic Simon & Garfunkel meets the Eagles meets a Harlem gospel choir meets Kanye West mash-up.

But it was their most recent song which first grabbed me and made me retrospectively appreciate just how good this band are. If it hadn’t been for the under-appreciated single Carry On, I wouldn’t have discovered the Some Nights album – probably the most captivating new pop album I’ve heard in 2012.

I was in Melbourne with friends in November watching music videos on TV and the video for Carry On came on. With its folk leanings it sounded like Mumford And Sons but with actually good vocals and I loved it instantly. Dark verses dealing with a contemplation of suicide plus a meditation on the mortality of our parents, coupled with an uplifting chorus about the past being “the sound of your feet upon the ground / carry on…”, Carry On is genuinely powerful.

As people inevitably and possibly futilely try to make sense of the massacre in Connecticut, on my Newstalk ZB show The Two last night (with co-host Pam Corkery) we played a couple of songs we thought were appropriate. One was Fleetwood Mac’s pre-Rumours gem Why and the other? Fun’s Carry On. Like Mumford And Sons only with good vocals!

*And how has Carry On done on the charts? Well, when I first wrote this article it had stalled at US #90 which bugged me enough to write an article bemoaning its lack of success. And while The Roxborogh Report’s 20,000 hits per month aren’t enough to influence foreign chart positions, it’s been good to see this quite lovely song climb (as of March 2013) to a far more respectful peak of US #20 and NZ #28.