Just the hits, please

     Confession: I have a love/hate relationship with greatest hits compilations. I think it’s because I stumbled into adolescence during the tail end of the Vinyl Era, when it was generally believed that the vehicle for artistic success in music was the studio album. Sure, singles are a great way to lure the newbies in, and live albums are a nice treat for the diehards, but it’s the album meticulously crafted in the studio that gets all the accolades and ultimately creates an artist’s audience. And greatest hits albums? At best, they’re a gimmick. At worst, they’re cynically designed cash cows, a way to satisfy a record contract while separating the gullible consumer from a few of his/her hard earned dollars.

     Fair to say none of the above is true anymore. In today’s streaming age most listeners just play the hits, clicking on their favorite tracks again and again, like dopamine-crazed mice in a lab experiment. Now the studio album only holds appeal for the middle-aged and nostalgia fetishists. I so happen to be a member of both camps, and can therefore count the number of greatest hits compilations in my post-streaming collection on two hands.

     So…when is a greatest hits collection a good thing? Moreover, when should you be tempted to pick up an artist’s greatest hits package as opposed to one of their studio offerings? Looking at my own collection, I was able to come up with seven rationales that fit every greatest hits album I had bothered to purchase. As a bit of a public service, I will present them here:

  1. The band in question is essentially a singles act. 

            Best example from my collection: The Carpenters—The Singles: 1969-1973

     I love The Carpenters. As a child of the 70’s I grew up on “Close to You,” mooned over “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and felt sad and lonely while listening to “I Need To Be In Love.” I have fond memories of watching the TV biopic of Karen Carpenter starring Cynthia Gibb, and sought out Todd Haynes’ delightfully weird Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story on YouTube. But I have never, ever, spent as much as one minute poring over deep cuts on A Song For You. I bet nobody else has, either. The Carpenters strength was not the breadth of their work, but the greatness of their singles. They were made for a greatest hits collection, and The Singles 1969-1973 is a damn good one1. Other artists that you can buy a singles compilation and feel you’ve got the best of their work: Commodores/Lionel Ritchie, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Little River Band, Ambrosia, and to a lesser extent, Neil Diamond2.

  1. The band in question doesn’t have one or two classic albums that I’m dying to buy, so it makes more sense to have a representative sample of their work.

            Best example from my collection: The White Stripes— Greatest Hits

     I discovered The White Stripes via a dubbed cassette of White Blood Cells my sister gave me. I thought the whole thing swung pretty hard (I especially liked the manic intensity of “Hotel Yorba”) and followed the band through the early oughts, enjoying most of what I heard. I had a couple of their albums on compact disc, but when I started collecting vinyl a few years ago, I couldn’t settle on an album I really loved more than the others. Jack White made it easy for me when The White Stripes released Greatest Hits five years ago, a two-disc compilation that is one-stop shopping for all but the most ardent fans. There are several songs included from all six of the Stripes studio albums, along with a couple non-album singles. The only song that didn’t make the cut I really miss is “Black Math,” an especially primal piece of garage rock off Elephant. Another artist who fashioned a greatest hits compilation that effectively surveys their career is New Order, whose Substance gathers all of the high points from the first six years of their existence3 in 12-inch versions that improve on those already excellent tracks. 

  1. I’m not sure what the band in question’s best albums are, so I’ll buy a greatest hits compilation for my collection until I figure it out.

           Best example from my collection: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers—Greatest Hits

If you grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, I would assume you find Tom Petty at least mildly enjoyable. You couldn’t escape him— Petty had ten Top Twenty hits in his career, and 48 singles that made the Mainstream Rock charts (the only one with more is U2). I have appreciated both singles and album tracks from up and down his discography, and feel he is the best purveyor of that “heartland rock sound”4 this side of Springsteen. However, I have no idea what his best album is. Wildflowers is the critical favorite, and Full Moon Fever is also well loved by both fans and critics, but I haven’t listened closely to either of them. Petty has a large discography— 17 albums! — and I need to spend some time with it before I decide what studio albums I want to add to my collection. In the meantime, I’m really glad Greatest Hits is on my shelves. There’s a reason it has sold almost four times as many copies as Wildflowers (Petty’s best selling studio album); it’s remarkably consistent, and has enough guitar licks and singalong choruses to keep even the casual Tom Petty fan happy. It even appends two then-new songs, one of which, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” became a hit (#14 on the Billboard chart) and a Petty classic. The only drawback to the collection is what it can’t include, as Petty released seven more albums after Greatest Hits, including Wildflowers. I’ll eventually do a deep dive into Petty’s work and figure out which of his studio albums to prioritize for future purchase. 

  1. The greatest hits albums is a placeholder.

Best example from my collection: Steely Dan—Greatest Hits 

Steely Dan’s run in the 70’s was incredibly impressive. I think every album from 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill through 1977’s Aja has its champions, and no one was doing jazz-influenced rock during this period as well as the Dan did. I will eventually have to get several of their albums for my vinyl collection— no one Steely Dan album adequately tells their story—but when I found a used copy of Greatest Hits online for cheap, I snapped it up. Greatest Hits was how I first came to Steely Dan, via an extended play cassette I listened to so much I wore it out. Ostensibly a singles collection, it includes a gaggle of songs that never made the Top Forty, as well as a number of important deep cuts like “Any Major Dude” and “Doctor Wu,” which is my favorite Steely Dan song. It served as a great introduction to the band and whetted my appetite for more of their work, which is what any good compilation should do. For now, it will suffice whenever I’m spinning records and need a Dan fix.

  1. The band in question had a large number of great songs that weren’t on their studio albums.

Best example from my collection: Joy Division—Substance

I already mentioned this album in the footnotes (you do read the footnotes, don’t you?) but it’s worth bringing up again: the Joy Division version of Substance not only catalogs two discs of essential singles you can’t find elsewhere, it presents a version of the band that is much more poppy and accessible than is displayed on their studio albums. Nearly half of the most-streamed songs on Spotify by the band are from Substance, and when I hear a Joy Division song in a movie or on television, it’s invariably from this album. “Love Will Tear us Apart” is the catchiest song the band ever recorded and “Atmosphere” is the prettiest; both are a far remove from the dark dirges and angular rockers that fill up most of Unknown Pleasures and Closer. I love Joy Division’s studio work but appreciate the band was multifaceted enough to create a singles comp that undermines (if only a bit) their brooding mythos5; it is therefore a treasured member of my collection. 

  1. The greatest hits album has a unique conception that makes it appealing.

Best example from my collection: Hits Are for Squares— Sonic Youth

I am as susceptible to a clever gimmick as the best of them, and that applies to greatest hits collections, too. Hits Are for Squares was originally released by the coffee chain Starbucks as one of those cds you could buy while picking up your latte, and was intended, supposedly, for the casual consumer. I can’t imagine Sonic Youth appealing to too many casual listeners, but I do like how the tracks for this album were selected—all of the songs were hand-picked by different celebrities (writers, musicians, and actors) who provided a blurb about why they loved the song they chose. It’s a fine collection, and the method of track selection makes it both accessible and surprisingly quirky, including some of my favorite Sonic Youth songs (such as “Shadow of a Doubt” and their cover of The Carpenters “Superstar”). The band Spoon used a similar trick when they assembled the songs for All the Weird Kids Up Front (Mas Rolas Chidas)—they had fans vote for which songs made the compilation. And it works—I found it a much more interesting collection than the conventional greatest-hits album Spoon released at the same time.

  1. The greatest hits album in question is so iconic it is irresistable.

Best examples from my collection: Decade— Neil Young 

                                                           Chronicle— Creedence Clearwater Revival

If you have any interest in classic rock, I’m betting you have a copy of Chronicle in some physical format. The ultimate party record (and a great road trip album), Chronicle lovingly assembles 20 singles that range in quality from very good to great, including such classics as “Fortunate Son,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” and…really, I don’t need to list these— Creedence released six albums between 1968 and 1970, and most people won’t be able to name one song on any of those albums that wasn’t on Chronicle. The two-disc compilation never flags, and would be my favorite greatest-hits album of all time…if Decade didn’t exist. Decade was how I first experienced Neil Young. I remember watching a movie that had  “Mr. Soul” on the soundtrack, being knocked out by the song, and buying the three cassette comp at the local Sam Goody a few weeks later. I was immediately struck by how good the collection was, and how expertly it was designed. Young pulls tracks from all over—songs from his time in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young as well as solo album tracks and b-sides and seven(!) previously unreleased tracks— and weaves them into the definitive release of Neil Young’s entire career. Decade is where I would send the Neil Young newbie to start, and would be surprised if it didn’t make them a lifetime fan. I may be far from the biggest apologist for the greatest-hits album, but this is the gold standard, and the reason compilations of this sort still matter.

  1.  Even better is Love Songs, which I still have a cassette copy of. But even that is missing “Touch Me When Were Dancing,” the best of Karen’s later vocal performances, and an ace cover of Klaatu’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.” ↩︎
  2. I admit: I’m curious to check out the Rick Rubin produced 12 Songs when I have time. I love what Rubin did for the tail end of Johnny Cash’s career, and would like to see if he had similar results with Neil. ↩︎
  3.  The same can’t be said of the companion collection by Joy Division (also called Substance) —which is also excellent, and does a nice job of gathering all the great non-album singles Joy Division recorded—because there are only two studio albums you have to buy, and they are both essential. You can buy two albums, can’t you? If you have to choose, I prefer Closer over Unknown Pleasures, probably because it’s sadder and lonelier than its predecessor, and on a couple songs (“Isolation,” “Decades”) points the direction the band would take as New Order after Ian Curtis’ death. ↩︎
  4.  I know Petty is from Gainesville, Florida, but he has much more in common musically with John Mellencamp than he does The Allman Brothers or any other southern rockers of the era. ↩︎
  5. Another compilation that partially attempts to redraw a band’s established image is the recent vinyl release Nine Sevens by Wire, which I picked up on Record Store Day. On the first disc Wire picks the catchiest songs off their first three albums and adds a couple of hummable non-album tracks; if this was the only thing you ever heard by the band, you’d never buy they were sometimes considered experimental or challenging. Disc two, on the other hand, has enough weird sounds and amorphous song structures to make you think you are listening to an entirely different band. ↩︎

My Favorite Songs of 1982

     I love the 80’s. Well, not living through it—that kind of sucked, actually—but the movies, television, and especially the music of the 80’s was all pretty wonderful. There was a study years ago that postulated that the music you are exposed to between the ages of 11 and 21 will forever be deeply tied to your identity, so it makes sense that the 80’s still matter to me, all these years— hell, decades—later. 

     You know what I love even more than 80’s music? Lists! I’m probably the reason those clickbait articles—the music related ones, anyway—are littering your search engine feeds, because I find headlines like TEN ROCK BANDS THAT DIDN’T HAVE A DRUMMER almost impossible to ignore1.

     All of this is preamble for a list of some of my favorite 80’s songs from the half-remembered days of 1982. Why 1982? It serves as a nice halfway point between when I first became seriously aware of music and started religiously listening to the radio (around 1976 or so) and the end of the 80’s. Besides, 1982 was essentially when MTV was born (it debuted four months earlier), and MTV is to the 80’s as tariffs are to our current president.  

     I tried to keep my list relatively concise—ten songs—but that was really damn hard, so I included a handful (okay, maybe two handfuls) of honorable mentions. You’ll quickly notice not all of these songs were singles, as I tend to prefer album tracks or deep cuts to songs that were played endlessly when I was growing up. Still, there were a few hit songs from the year that were undeniable and I had to include. 

     Now let’s return to the days of suitcase-sized boomboxes, video games with lousy graphics, and some of the best music ever pressed to vinyl: 

Honorable Mention—Three creepy songs: Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask is widely considered to be one of his best albums, and it includes The Gun, one of my favorite Reed songs. Reed’s deadpan delivery over minimal instrumentation (with one vital lyrical omission) makes this song about a gun-toting sociopath truly chilling. Pornography is the title track off The Cure’s fourth album, and it’s a doozy. Garbled vocal samples, icy keyboards and tribal drums anchor the track, gradually increasing in intensity while Robert Smith shrieks about “the sounds of slaughter.” Smith never wrote a darker song than this. Time Bomb doesn’t sound like anything else on Beatitude, an underrated solo album by The Cars’ front man Ric Ocasek. It’s cold, stark, and odd, as Ocasek lists off pairs of seemingly unrelated items (ex: “I live in a world/of blather and godfear”) that grow in menace as the song progresses, culminating in a searing guitar solo. It should have been a new wave classic.

Honorable Mention—Three great songs by 70’s rock dinosaurs: Signals might not have been one of Rush’s best albums, but Subdivisions is a great Rush song. Rush updates their classic sound on this keyboard-heavy track, with guitarist Lifeson relegated to fills and a relatively restrained solo on the bridge. Geddy Lee sings about alienation and isolation here, which is very 80’s. King Crimson in 1982 sounded nothing like their incarnations in the previous two decades. They managed to integrate a postpunk sensibility into their prog framework starting with 1981’s Discipline, and continue with this years Beat, which starts off with Neal and Jack and Me, a nod to the beat writers of the 50’s. Newcomer Adrian Belew is a welcome addition to the Crimson sound, and his unique guitar stylings here and on all the King Crimson 80’s albums are another weapon in the band’s arsenal. He’s not a bad vocalist, either. Eminence Front may well be my favorite Who song. Sacrilege, maybe, but the song is just so damn catchy. The keyboards have a Tangerine Dream quality that I love, and Roger Daltrey’s vocal is one of his very best.

Honorable Mention—Four shots of new wave goodness: Love Plus One was the only song by Haircut 100 to hit in the U.S., probably due to the fact the band fired their lead man and sole songwriter after their first album. Still, this is one groovy song, with lots of bright saxophone, an understated guitar riff, and some vibraphone (which is always welcome). A Flock of Seagulls did some fine work in the beginning of the 80’s, especially on their debut album. Space Age Love Song is my favorite— the vocal is earnest, the guitar/keyboard bits are simple but propulsive, and the whole thing is so damn pretty. I could have picked a half dozen songs off of Duran Duran’s Rio—it’s that good—but I went with The Chauffer, which is the band at their coolest and most atmospheric. A bank of keyboards, some sound effects, a well-programmed drum machine, and Simon LeBon’s soaring vocal make for a winner. The Psychedelic Furs are one of my favorite bands. If pressed, I prefer the harder edge of the songs off their 1981 album Talk Talk Talk, but Love My Way is a wonderful song. Richard Butler is an excellent vocalist and lyricist2, and here you also get Todd Rundgren playing a marimba and backing vocals by Flo and Eddie.

Honorable Mention—Every song on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska: Nebraska was my entry point into Springsteen fandom3, and is on my list of the ten best albums ever. Springsteen’s mournful acoustic masterpiece doesn’t have one bum track on it, and “Atlantic City,” “State Trooper,” and “Highway Patrolman” would easily vie for spots on this list. However, I would rather listen to all those songs in conjunction with each other, as part of a perfect album.  

Honorable Mention—One song my wife loves: There is no way a list of music from 1982 would be complete without at least mentioning Eddy Grant’s Electric Avenue, one of my wife’s favorites. Grant’s expert blend of rock and reggae is definitely one of the funkiest protest songs ever written (there’s one that tops it later on this list), and is perfect summer driving music, preferably with the windows down and a breeze blowing. Grant didn’t let any of his music hit streaming services until January of last year, but “Electric Avenue” is available now. Go listen to it before Eddy changes his mind.

#10. Billie Jean—Michael Jackson: It’s hard to assess Michael these days. The shadow of scandal and bad behavior blots out his legacy for many; I tend to focus on the part of his career before his sudden ascent to fame (like 1979’s Off the Wall) where I can enjoy the music without being forced to address the person Jackson would become. That being said, I don’t have to make excuses to enjoy this song—”Billie Jean” is undeniable. It is actually a simple song held together by two things: that amazing, hypnotic bassline, and Jackson’s vocal. Michael sings this song like it’s the only song he’s ever going to sing— he yelps, he squeals, he takes exaggerated breaths between lines-but nothing feels forced or out of place, as if each vocal tic and trick is predestined. The lyric is a take on the same sort of theme Eminem would explore in “Stan”: fans are crazy, fans will bring you down. Jackson’s inspired performance suggest that he believes it; you can practically feel his paranoia and anxiety seeping between the beats. It was just the start (of course) of a slew of hits for Michael, but his career could have ended with this, his greatest song. Maybe it should have4.

#9. 867-5309 (Jenny)–Tommy Tutone: A nostalgia pick, certainly—few people would readily assert this one-hit wonder is one of the objectively best songs of any year, let alone a year as clotted with great songs as 1982. Musically the song is almost inconsequential: a nervous slice of rock and roll, competently played, borrowing equally from Elvis Costello and Eddie Money. But Tutone manages to imbue his tune with a sweaty desperation that appealed to a teenaged me, probably due to my longing for connection with a member of the opposite sex as much as Tutone did, if you believed his lyrics. Speaking of lyrics: these are ridiculous and more than a little sleazy, but they speak to the selling point at the heart of pop music—fantasy, mystery, the potential for danger or escape. And love, of course, which Tutone hopes to get from the anonymous girl with the phone number scribbled across the bathroom wall. We were content to settle for singing along, miming the phone digits with our hands when we got to the chorus.

#8. Seconds—The Human League: 1981 is the year The Human League actually transformed from a icy robot5 to a dancy robot, but 1982 is when the move brought them chart success. “Don’t You Want Me” hit number 1 on the Billboard charts in July of 1982, and will always be a) a great little earworm of a tune, b) a very strange choice for an album closer6, and c) a song that instantly reminds me of my first summer job as a busboy/dishwasher at a country club restaurant, a job I failed spectacularly at. “Don’t You Want Me” is not, however, my favorite Human League song of 1982. That would be the hit single’s b-side, “Seconds”. A stark piece of synth pop, “Seconds” manages to be both eerie and catchy. Phil Oakey intones about the Kennedy assassination while piercing keyboard notes soar above him, the insistent drumbeat burrowing beneath the song and proving this incarnation of The Human League was a dance band, even at its darkest. Few songs better capture the mixture of kitsch and angst that was the early 80’s like this song did, and it may well be the highest point in the band’s catalog.

#7. The Message— Gradmaster Flash and the Furious Five: I didn’t hear this song in 1982. Most of my early exposures to hip-hop were through MTV, and they notoriously avoided most black artists in the early days of the channel. A few years later the video for this song was in heavy rotation, and I can’t hear the song without seeing the blurry herky-jerky footage of New York City and Melle Mel rapping-in-place about being young and black in the early Eighties. The music here is skeletal funk, yet also so memorable and catchy it has been sampled in other songs 331 times. And the lyrics? Basically a litany of the horrors of ghetto life: drugs, pimps, gangs, violence, poverty, prison. I didn’t have to live through any of that, but I could completely relate to Mel’s internal emotional state, neatly communicated in the following couplet:

Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge

I’m trying not to lose my head

And that laugh— a half-chuckle that manages to express equal measures of incredulity and exasperation, ridiculousness and rage. It too was influential, inspiring Phil Collins’ bark in “Mama,” another song about desperation. “The Message” is considered the first prominent socially-concious hip-hop song, but I always loved it as much for how it made me feel. Like Mel, I’ve often wondered how I kept from going under.

#6. Capital (It Fails Us Now) —Gang of Four: Gang of Four is my favorite “issues” band. They always had a lot to say, sure, but they did it with ferocious intensity and a barbed melodicism that made their songs so damn memorable. I especially loved their rhythm section—Hugo Burnham is an underrated drummer, and Dave Allen’s bass playing on the early Gang of Four albums is among my favorite guitar work of any punk (or early postpunk) band7. Here, they provide a menacing bottom while Andy Gill’s lead guitar skitters over the top. Jon King (not the CNN anchor) wails about his struggles to avoid drowning in credit card debt and his need to buy, buy, buy, which hasn’t changed one iota in forty plus years: from the first day I was born/I reached out for my credit card. King rants about wanting a freezer and a “hi-fi” while the guitars screech, but it’s Gill who gets the best line as a nervous aside: “I’m still in credit…just.” I think of this song often and how prescient it is—usually when I get my credit card statement in the mail.

#5. Shock the Monkey—Peter Gabriel: 1980 to 1982 is my sweet spot for Peter Gabriel. Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, but it took him a couple of solo albums to get his musical bearings and figure out his sound; after 82’s Security, Gabriel got poppier and more accessible, and for me, a little less interesting. “Shock the Monkey” is poppy, in a way—it reached #29 on the Billboard Top 40—but it also (as AllMusic noted) sounded like nothing else on the radio that year. This was the first Peter Gabriel song I ever heard, and it struck my teenaged ear as cold and alien…but also incredibly funky, riding on the thrum from bassist Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick. I loved the timbre of Gabriel’s voice—he always sounds tense or unsettled, even when he is singing a love song—and that anxiety bleeds into the snatches of guitar, the programmed drum beats, the periodic stabs of keyboard. I figured the lyrics were about animal testing or somesuch, but what stuck out to me were lines like cover me when I breathe and I can’t take any more, wrapping the song in a sense of claustrophobic dread I found appealing. By the time Gabriel hiccups over the word “shock” 4 minutes and 40 seconds in, I was hooked. Security was one of the first cassette tapes I ever bought, and even on my tinny little cassette player, this song always sounded imposing…and amazing.  

#4. Gypsy—Fleetwood Mac: If someone pressed me against a wall and demanded I tell them who my favorite Mac is, well…it would be Stevie. It was always Stevie. Oh, I loved Lindsey, all of his guitar wizardry and his studio tricks, trying to get Brian Wilson to meet Brian Eno by way of David Bryne. And I loved Christine McVie formerly Perfect, who had been in the band forever and knew how to survive it better than any of them8, always good for one amazing song for every three she penned. But Stevie…wow. She is easily my favorite creator of rock ballads in music history9, and this is her last great one with the band10. That being said, this might be the ballad where Stevie gets the most help to make the song great. John McVie deploys what may be my favorite bass line of his outside of “Dreams,” I love McVie’s repeating keyboard riff, and Lindsey’s backing vocals are superb. And when Stevie is done pouring her heart out about her early days when she was happier, Lindsey provides a beautiful guitar outro that gets me in the feels every, every time.

#3. Gardening At Night—R.E.M. I didn’t hear this song in 1982. Athens, Georgia was a million miles from the midwestern hinterlands where I was growing up, and R.E.M. were years from playing on radio stations I listened to. I discovered R.E.M. in college through a friend, but even then this song remained a mystery— the Chronic Town EP was out of print at the time (despite every critic within a stone’s throw gushing over it), and it was years before I was able to snag a cassette copy when it was reissued. Many white whales don’t turn out to be worth the effort to chase them, but Chronic Town did, and especially this song, sandwiched between two other winners on Side One. “Gardening at Night” starts with a little acoustic guitar riff repeated four times quickly before the jangly guitars kick in— much cleaner sounding than anything on Murmur (the band’s album-length debut), which wouldn’t be released until April of 1983. I love Peter Buck’s sitar, I love Stipe’s vocal (which isn’t as mumbly as he’d be accused of later on), and I love the obtuse lyrics, which were inspired by the habit some had of urinating by the side of the road at night (hence, night gardening). I have gone through periods of my life where I loved R.E.M. and others where I was indifferent to their charms11, but I have never grown tired of this song. This is where the magic first happened.

#2. I Dreamed I Dream—Sonic Youth: Consider this a paragraph-long plug for Sonic Youth’s criminally out-of-print collection Screaming Fields of Sonic Love. A likely attempt by record label DGC to cash in on Sonic Youth’s new-found critical success, Screaming goes backward, Memento-like, through the band’s career to that point, starting with the more accessible songs on Daydream Nation, getting increasingly more drony and dissonant, and ending with “I Dreamed I Dream.” This song starts with a thudding bass line that never changes through its over five minute running time, then adds the strum of oddly-tuned guitars. The guitars continue to churn while Kim Gordon talks about impotence and drops f-bombs in a disaffected monotone, while Thurston Moore harmonizes…sort of.  I know many prefer Sonic Youth’s later, poppier music, but this is where I like them best—edgy, dark, experimental. I have loved many songs and albums throughout the breadth of Sonic Youth’s career, but this is the one I prize the most.

#1. Something in the Water (Does Not Compute) —Prince: There was a time where I didn’t really like Prince. Oh, I liked “Little Red Corvette” and “When Doves Cry” —I can’t imagine having the gift of hearing and not appreciating those songs—but “Purple Rain and “Let’s Go Crazy” were everywhere in 1984 and 1985, and I was tired of it. Yawn, I thought. Then I saw the video for “Dirty Mind” on Night Flight12 one evening, and decided my opinion needed revising. I quickly bought Dirty Mind and Controversy…and 1999, where “Something in the Water” is on Side Three. I loved all of it, but “Something in the Water” trumped everything. I loved the skittering drum track, the keyboards that sound like they were beamed down from space, and Prince’s vocal, which comes across as incredibly haughty and totally vulnerable at the same time13. There’s a minimalism and sense of space in this song that Prince would utilize again and again (to great effect, I would add) during his career, but never as good as he did here. And it climaxes14 with my favorite scream in the history of recorded music. This is my favorite song by one of my favorite artists. There is no way any other song could be my #1 song of 1982.

  1. I’m tempted to write a book comprised of interesting music lists with attention-grabbing titles like you’d find on the internet called Rock and Roll Clickbait. ↩︎
  2. Butler is responsible for one of my favorite lines of all time: “Words are all just useless sound.” ↩︎
  3.  Nebraska is the only album I own in all three physical formats: vinyl, cassette, and CD. ↩︎
  4.  I cannot think of  “Billie Jean” without seeing images from the music video in my head—it’s the way I first experienced the song, back when Friday Night Videos was still a thing. I’m sure the video is horribly dated today, but it was a revelation in 1983, a surreal tone poem that had the added advantage of Michael dancing, something he did better than, well, everybody. Michael was a wonderful singer, but it’s doubtful he would have become the superstar he was without the videos. ↩︎
  5. Prior to changing their style and becoming a new wave dance machine, The Human League made stiffly mannered synth rock with no bite and few hooks. It didn’t sell, so Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh left in 1980 to form Heaven 17. I’ve always liked their song “Let Me Go.” but haven’t really explored their catalog. ↩︎
  6. Dare (1981) is a very backloaded album, as the best three songs—”Love Action (I Believe in Love,” “Seconds,” and “Don’t You Want Me” are the last three songs on Side Two. Side One has 1.5 good songs and achingly clumsy lyrics. ↩︎
  7. It’s no surprise the band got less interesting when Gill left in 1981. He’s still present on this song, though, as it was recorded a year earlier. ↩︎
  8. It’s ironic, therefore, that she was the first of the band members to pass away. I will always treasure McVie’s work on Tusk (especially “Over and Over” and “Brown Eyes”), one of the two main reasons I’ve always ranked that album higher than Rumours (the other being Stevie’s amazing “Beautiful Child”). ↩︎
  9. Although Brandi Carlisle in gaining on her, year by year, and I am slowly learning to appreciate Joni Mitchell. Check back in a couple years. ↩︎
  10.  I’m sorry if anyone’s a big fan of the ballads on Tango in the Night, but…no. “Seven Wonders” is too slick and shiny, “Welcome to the Room…Sara” sounds rote and exhausted, and “When I See You Again” is too maudlin even for me, Mr. Yacht Rock. ↩︎
  11.  I didn’t like Out of Time when it was initially released, and quit paying attention to R.E.M. for awhile. I when back and listened to a big chunk of the band’s catalog about five years ago and realized I was hearing them differently. I now appreciate them more than ever, and would rank them in my ten favorite bands of all time. ↩︎
  12. Anybody out there remember USA Network’s Night Flight? I learned more about music and oddball movies from that late night program than just about anywhere else. ↩︎
  13.  Favorite line: “Why in God’s name do you want to make me cry? Why?” ↩︎
  14. Pun intended. This is Prince, after all. ↩︎

Under the Radar: Five Artists Worth Discovering

     Here’s a guess: most of my favorite music is stuff you like too. Iconic artists get their stature because they create art that pleases a lot of people, that resonates in some way with a large audience. Hell, even cult artists have rabid fan bases. But there is not a 1:1 correlation between popularity and quality, and there are plenty of talented musicians who never get the audience they deserve. I feel one of the goals of music journalism is to elevate underappreciated artists, to keep them from getting lost in the morass of streaming options available to the average listener. 

     To that end, I present five of my favorite artists that deserve more attention. I’ve tried to avoid focusing on obscure artists from yesteryear (with one exception), and four of the five have released an album in the last two years or have one scheduled in 2025. They run the gamut from indie singer/songwriter to new wave to edgy postpunk, and all are worth your attention:

The Comsat Angels: Let’s start with the oldest artist of the bunch. Despite being critic’s darlings, Comsat Angels were already pretty obscure twenty years ago when I first heard of them— I had to buy a bootleg box set just to be able to hear the band1, as all their albums were out of print. Things aren’t much better now: none of their albums are on streaming services, save a lousy compilation of demos that doesn’t give you an accurate picture of the band’s chops. You can listen to their entire discography on YouTube, thank goodness, especially their incredible first two albums. Waiting For A Miracle (1980) is one of my favorite debut albums ever, a moody offering that sounds a little like early Psychedelic Furs (think “Sister Europe”) or a less funky, less political Gang of Four2.  Waiting does not have a bum track on it, and is just as sonically interesting as Unknown Pleasures or Entertaintment!, if not as musically groundbreaking. Among many highlights is the nominal single “Independence Day,” which includes a chorus so catchy my children could sing along:

But I can’t stand up, and I can’t sit down

‘Cause a great big problem stopped me in my tracks

I can’t relax ‘cause I haven’t done a thing

And I can’t do a thing ‘cause I can’t relax

The Angels second album, Sleep No More (1981), gets gloomier the longer you listen to it, approaching Pornography-era Cure levels of mopery. Lead vocalist Stephen Fellows has an arresting voice that doesn’t sound like any of his contemporaries, and the band is incredibly tight, leaning a bit more towards soundscapes than the edgy new wave of the debut. These are genuinely great albums, and it’s a shame they aren’t better known. Later albums were less consistent or ambitious3, but good songs are sprinkled throughout their catalog. I don’t know why so little of the Angels discography is unavailable on streaming or album reissue, but I hope this is rectified; this is a band that’s too good to be a musical footnote.  

FACS: FACS is a relative newcomer to the scene, their first album coming out only seven years ago. Named after the numbering system for Factory Records releases, the band doesn’t sound much like Factory’s most famous clients, Joy Division. Instead FACS come across like an unholy alliance between Slint and a proggier Sonic Youth, with a little Wire and Radiohead thrown in for good measure. I first became aware of the band when I caught their enthralling live set at Riot Fest in 2021, and became an instant convert. FACS are experts at creating space in their music, both between the individual instruments and (sometimes) between the band and the listener. Many of their songs have an icy, detached vibe that appeals to me. They are also remarkably consistent, despite various members joining and leaving the band since its inception. Every one of their six albums are a variation of their signature sound, so if you enjoy the band’s over-arching aesthetic, their entire discography is worth checking out. FACS’ latest, Wish Defense, which was released this month, may be my favorite of the bunch, and was the last project Steve Albini worked on before his untimely death.

Hayden: Canadian singer/songwriter Hayden Dresser started as an indie folkie who showed up briefly with a music video that got some rotation on MTV in 1996, then receded from mass attention.  I bought his debut, Everything I Long For, based on that video single (“Bad As They Seem”) and a stunning performance of my still-favorite Hayden song, “Skates”4. I kind of lost track of his music after that (see above), but rediscovered him a few years ago when doing a deep dive on some of my favorite artists from the Nineties. Turns out Hayden had released eight(!) albums in the interim, each filled with smart, thoughtful, folk-tinged rock. Hayden reminds me a little of another Canadian-Neil Young-but with more of a pop sensibility and no guitar theatrics5. His most recent album, Are We Good (2024), is another success, its eleven tracks rarely raising their voice (you could play most of them in a coffeehouse on a Saturday morning), but still showing off how catchy and deftly arranged they are. The album’s closer, “Can’t Happen Now,” is a pretty plea to not end a relationship, and was co-written by another kindred spirit, The National’s Matt Berninger. In today’s Americana-soaked music scene, I think Hayden is ripe for a resurgence.

Mclusky: I think everyone needs a snotty, post-hardcore band in their life, and Mclusky is mine. I first discovered them at the tail end of 2003, when my brother-in-law threw a couple of tracks off Mclusky Do Dallas (2002) on a mix cd he made for me. I was immediately taken with their raw energy, their in-your-face lyrics, and their caustic wit6. Frontman Andrew Falkous has one of the great voices in rock, able to slide effortlessly from sneer to bark to scream, spitting out sarcastic asides and vicious putdowns while the band careens around him. It’s hard to believe Mclusky is a trio— this band is loud—and they’ve mastered mitigating the noise by being so damn catchy. Third album The Difference Between You and Me Is I’m Not on Fire (2004) contains my favorite Mclusky song, “Support Systems,” the album’s closer. Over nearly eight minutes, Mclusky gradually builds from a quietly repeated guitar chord with a hushed vocal to a wall of apocalyptic noise that is a beautiful assault on the ears. Mclusky broke up shortly after this album’s release (Falkous went on the form Future of the Left and Christian Fitness, both of which are worth checking out) but they reunited a few years ago as a touring venture. They have recently recorded a new album which is set to be released this May. There are few bands working today who capture the old punk spirit like Mclusky, and I eagerly look forward to their new work.  


Andy Shauf: Another Canadian singer/songwriter! I didn’t even know Shauf existed until I read a review of his most recent album Norm (2023) on a music website. The write-up and accompanying video made the album look intriguing, so I gave it a listen. I now own three of Shauf’s albums on vinyl, and played his song “The Magician” more than any other in 2024 (according to Spotify). Three things immediately spring to mind when I think of Andy Shauf. One: There is a fair amount of clarinet woven through his music— Shauf frequently plays all the instruments on his albums, and clarinet is one of the instruments he knows how to play. It’s a welcome sound, and adds a texture to Shauf’s music that’s quite effective. Two: Shauf writes concept albums—his last four albums have all had a unifying idea threaded through the songs, and Norm even employed a story editor to make sure the narrative hung together correctly. The Party (2016) is about what the title says, Neon Skyline (2020) is set in a bar over the course of an evening, and Wilds (2021) is about an ill-fated vacation. Norm is even more audacious, a story cycle about a hapless loner, his romantic conquest, and er…God. It works like gangbusters, and was probably my favorite album of 2023. Three: Shauf writes with such empathy and insight that it elevates his music above your standard singer/songwriter. Whether he’s singing about quarreling couples or murderous stalkers, Shauf is able to get inside the skin of his characters, to make them come alive. To me, Andy Shauf is the kind of artist so in my musical wheelhouse I should have been listening to him for years; instead, I had to stumble on him almost by accident. Shauf, like all the artists heralded here, have flown under the radar for far too long. Give them a listen; I am certain they will merit your interest.

  1. The box set was It’s History, a compilation of Comsat Angels’ first three albums with previously unreleased b-sides. It remains one of my most prized musical possessions. ↩︎
  2. This is not a slam on Gang of Four, a band I adore. “Anthrax” off their incredible first album is one of my ten most favorite songs ever. ↩︎
  3.  Third album Fiction— which is much poppier than its predecessors—is probably the best of the rest. ↩︎
  4. “Skates” is an early showcase of Hayden’s songwriting ability. Over an ominous acoustic guitar strum we get a tale of a meeting between a young store clerk and a sad older man, told in clipped lines that read like laconic poetry: when I was younger/a part-time job worker/department store center/I saw a man enter. The man is buying ice skates, see, but it’s summertime, and the man seems distraught…We eventually get a startling revelation in the final verse that solves our mystery as the song builds to a crescendo, Hayden’s voice howling over the guitar. I found the song chilling when I first heard it on MTV all those years ago, and it still packs considerable power now. ↩︎
  5. The one exception is “Dynamite Walls” off Skyscraper National Park, which has a extended guitar solo on its bridge that sounds exactly like something Neil Young would write. It is easily my second-favorite Hayden song. ↩︎
  6. A couplet as supporting evidence: my love is bigger than your love/we take more drugs than a touring funk band. ↩︎

Lining Up the Dinosaurs: Journey’s Infinity

And we finish up our arena rock tour with the first platinum album by Steve Perry, excuse me, Journey.

Infinity

Preconceived Notions: As I alluded to above, Steve Perry is Journey. When I came to Journey as a kid it wasn’t for the guitar solos or the rhythm section or the surprisingly tepid drums—it was for Perry’s voice, especially on the ballads. Perry was the Lord of the Slow Dance, the King of the Singalong Chorus. Yeah, they occasionally hit the jackpot with one of their driving rockers like “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)1” or “Anyway You Want It,” but that wasn’t what made Journey oodles and oodles of money in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I know Journey has been touring without Perry for the last 26 years, but I have no desire to endorse that bullshit with any of my money. Without Perry, Journey is just some dudes band led by guys who used to be in the Babys (no, not John Waite) and Santana (and not Carlos Santana, either).

Merch I Owned: The only Journey album I ever bought was Frontiers, home of the aforementioned “Seperate Ways” and the all-time classic ballad “Faithfully,” which I would attempt to sing along to every time it came on my radio2. It also had an underrated side two, which I ended up playing more than the “hits” side. Maybe that bodes well for the purely album tracks on this one?

Miscellany: My favorite Journey song, like my favorite song by many artists3, is an almost willfully off-the-beaten-path kind of choice. I have always loved “The Party’s Over,” a minor Journey single that peaked at number 34 on Billboard and doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry. I guess I’ve always loved the way it fits in the pocket between Journey’s harder-driving tunes and their ballads, and feel it’s one of Perry’s most accomplished performances, while sounding effortless at the same time. And the melody works— I love the way the guitar runs underneath it like a snake, winding through the song. I also have a very soft spot for Perry’s solo song “Foolish Heart,” another single that didn’t hit all that well (#18).

Track by Track:

Lights- I’ve never liked this song as much as everyone else does, but it is our first introduction to Mr. Perry. A little too bluesy for me (quite unlike most Perry-era Journey) and too static— we have a louder chorus, but not a faster one— even the bridge with the requisite guitar solo (we’ll get to those) doesn’t really cook. If Perry wasn’t singing, you could convince yourself it was Stevie Ray Vaughn. That’s not what I’m looking for here.

Feeling That Way— I love that Perry doesn’t sing first on this song. It’s like he strolls in to save the song (because Greg Rolie is smooth but bland—there’s a reason Journey went looking for a lead singer). Like “Lights,” this isn’t as driving as later Journey rockers (even “Don’t Stop Believin’” is more propulsive than this). Here, only the guitar solo moves. 

Anytime— Greg Rolie is singing again, but I don’t mind him as much here (this seems to be his vocal wheelhouse). Steve shows up in the background, and doesn’t do much. However, the guitar licks on this one meld perfectly with Rolie’s vocal, the chorus is nice, and it feels like the whole band is simpatico on this one. This is usually played in tandem with “Feeling That Way” on the radio, but it’s only when “Anytime” starts that my ears perk up. One of the better songs on the album.

La Do Da—This shows up on a number of Journey live albums and setlists, so somebody out there likes it. There’s a chuggy guitar bit that starts the song that reminds me of “Back Talk” off of Frontiers, but what this sounds like more than anything is second-tier April Wine4. With dumber lyrics. And another extended guitar solo. Somewhere between irritating and forgettable.

Patiently—Perry has penned/sung some amazing ballads, but this is not one of them. This is the first song he and Neil Schon wrote together, and you can see the vague outlines of the template they would use on later albums. On “Patiently”, though, the ballad part is way too syrupy and shopworn before tripping into full-blown guitar rock. Later ballads had a much more seamless build to them— here, you can see all the cracks.

Wheel in the Sky—Upped a notch because my wife really likes this song. The lyrics are better, even if they turn on one metaphor that they drag through the whole song.  Perry sings this one extremely well— he’s the main reason to stick around for this one. The guitar work is solid (albeit a little tiresome by this point)5, and it’s out before it overstays its welcome too much. This is a “quiet rocker,” not a ballad, but it’s the closest this album has to a decent one of those. Not in the upper echelon of Journey classics, but it is one of the top tunes on Infinity.

Somethin to Hide—Another Perry/Schon number. The arrangement is a bit more interesting than the preceding non-single album tracks, and I appreciate the 10cc harmonies on the bridge (sounds like they cribbed them from “The Things We Do For Love,” released a year earlier). And the guitar solo is shorter. Still not as good as anything on Frontiers or Escape.

Winds of March—The longest song on the album. The buildup is quasi-ballad material with a madrigal lilt, and does nothing for me. It follows the same format as Styx’s “Queen of Spades” (a much, much better song), where we do the slow dance thing for a couple minutes, then explode into frenzied soloing. Here though, we get a very funky keyboard solo that doesn’t fit with the rest of the song. At all. The song gets a D, but the keyboard solo is at least a B-. And then we have another !@#$ guitar solo.

Can Do—Is this Foghat?6 Are we sure? And if Journey is going to ape Foghat and insist on all these damn guitar solos, could they try to do one as good as the one at the end of “Easy Money”?

Opened the Door—A color-by-numbers ballad, but the choruses are pretty, we have some nice harmonizing, a bit more of an emphasis on keyboards for most of the song…and then we close the album out with another guitar solo. Sigh.

Final Impressions/Evaluation: Look, most everybody’s first day of school sucks, right? This is Perry’s first album with Journey, and it took awhile for the pairing to really produce results. Neither this or the next studio album (Evolution, featuring “Lovin, Touchin, Squeezin”) made the Billboard top 10 album chart— it wasn’t until 1980’s Departure that Journey accomplished that feat. That being said, this isn’t a very good album. The singles are fine, but there isn’t a non-single track on this album I truly enjoy. If you appreciate the singles from this era of the band, I would highly recommend seeking out a greatest hits package.

  1. The video to this song is another candidate for Worst Video of All Time: we get a woman fast-walking around a warehouse, way too many close-ups of Steve Perry’s face, and the band playing air guitar (and air keyboard and air drums). Eventually the boys find their instruments, but they play them about as convincingly as the imaginary ones. And we get lots of close-ups of their handsome mugs, too— sometimes three or four in a shot! It’s all very earnest and high-strung and ridiculous, and it never fails to make me chuckle. ↩︎
  2.  That song had some hella high notes! ↩︎
  3. My favorite Prince song is “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute).” Favorite R.E.M. tune is “Country Feedback.” Favorite Beatles is “Dear Prudence.” You get the idea. ↩︎
  4. No offense to April Wine—not in the slightest. Nature of the Beast is a very solid early 80’s album, and proved 70’s rockers could still survive (for a little while longer) in the New Wave Eighties. And “All Over Town” still kicks ass, all these years later. ↩︎
  5. Every song on this album has a guitar solo. Every damn one. And most of them aren’t particularly memorable or gripping. ↩︎
  6. Yeah, I don’t mind Foghat, either. ↩︎

Lining Up the Dinosaurs: Toto’s Self-Titled

 Two left. Today we tackle the debut album from those renowned studio rats, Toto.

Toto

Preconceived Notions: I honestly don’t know a whole hell of a lot about Toto. I have never heard a non-single by these guys, so all I’ve had to judge them by is what I’ve heard on the radio over the years. That means “Africa,” 1of course, and “Rosanna,” and the singles off this album. A few others, I guess. I like all of it, to varying degrees, but none of it ever resonated to the point I bothered exploring their discography. That’s not exactly true— I’ve thought about listening to a Toto album a number of times, but, um, I just never got around to it. Nice I can rectify that here.

Merch I Owned: Nothing. Zip. Nada. I vividly remember admiring the cover of Toto in the record store when I was in junior high.  

Miscellany: I have always appreciated the Hydra track “99,” partially, I’m sure, because they were singing about a girl with a number for a name, which struck me as a unique occurrence in the annals of pop music. That, and the moody piano/guitar coda give the song an oddness that made it stand out from it’s lite-rock peers. Turns out it was inspired by the George Lucas dystopian film THX-1138, a film I’ve always meant to see but have somehow avoided. I sense a pattern here.

Track by Track:

Child’s Anthem—And we open with an instrumental. Not my favorite way to start an album; indeed, I can’t think of a great instrumental opener to a rock album ever2. This is sort of proggy, in a Vangelis kind of way. The keyboards have a “Funeral For a Friend” tone (another long, draggy song I’ve never cared for), even though Elton John rarely played anything as manic-sounding as this. Very repetitive and immediately tiresome—I swore it was taking forever to finish, but the song is less than three minutes long. I hope this isn’t a harbinger of what’s to come.

I’ll Supply The Love—I totally forgot about this song! It got to number 45 on the Billboard Top 100, so I’m sure I heard it, even if it never merited a Casey Kasem mention. It sounds like Sweet (maybe more Bay City Rollers, but that’s ok) meets Earth, Wind, and Fire. And the bridge is 10CC. That’s a compliment. I love the disco elements, the singalong chorus, the insistent snare drum. This shoulda been the opener.

Georgy Porgy—It’s nice to hear two very stylistically different hits back to back, an anomaly among these arena-rock albums. The bass line here is great, the lead vocal (by Steve Lukather) is buttery smooth, and the keyboards scream late 70’s. I didn’t really know this song well until Sirius XM’s Yacht Rock channel made it a staple. It’s a minor classic of the form. Shout out to Cheryl Lynn (“Got to be Real”), whose backing vocals put the song over the top.

Manuela Run— The good: this is the third different lead vocalist in as many songs. The bad: if someone asked me what Generic Toto sounded like, I would point to this song. This is filler, I suppose, and way too shiny and bright, but it’s well played and earwormy enough. It’s a busy song, which mitigates the vanilla-ess of it.

You Are The Flower —This doesn’t sound like anything that came before it. It sort of reminds me of Richard Marx, with a much more soulful chorus (Marx, Wind, and Fire?). Lots of nice touches on this one: the bluesy keyboards, the excellent guitar solo on the bridge, the flute filips here and there. This is the first album I’ve reviewed in this series where what is going on in the background is as consistently good as what is going on in the foreground. You can tell these guys were sought-after session musicians. Significantly better than the last song, which wasn’t bad. Really good production values here—very, very slick. 

Girl Goodbye— this is so quintessential early 80’s sounding it made me smile when the guitars started to kick in. This is walking down a dark street wearing a jean jacket in the rain. Lyrics: he shot someone and he’s on the run. Cheesy, the main riff gets played into the ground, but these guys sing the hell out of this, and play very well. Action movie soundtrack music of the finest sort.

Takin It Back— And we have our fourth(!) lead singer. This one is softer, prettier. Again, great bass licks, as well as a nice keyboard sound that fills the rest of the track. Not one dud song since the opening instrumental.

Rockmaker— This one sounds like a B-side, but even here, I hear the hooks. It is very late 70’s lite rock, and I realize I am programmed to like late 70’s lite rock. Nice guitar solo!

Hold The Line— I have always loved this song. Just that piano riff, da da da da da da da. The bass is great, it’s sung well, the lead guitar solo is boss! I am consistently impressed by how clean the keyboards sound, and how much I like all the guitar solos. Spoiler: This is a very good album, period. It makes me want to listen to Hydra— it’s the first album I’ve reviewed that’s good enough to get me curious about the rest of the band’s catalog. 

Angela—This song is really sleepy to start, and very Christopher Cross-y, which is not exactly a selling point. Then we have these crunchy guitars that come in on the choruses, like the song is having a mood swing. And it all builds to a big finish. Not the best song on the album, but more interesting than almost every song on the REO album. 

Final Impressions/Evaluation: Like I said before, this is a very good album, the best one I have reviewed so far. I really appreciate the variety of vocalists and styles—I wonder if things will get a little more homogenized on subsequent albums, when Toto isn’t brand new and figures out what sells and what the public wants. Debut albums are often my favorites (Gang of Four’s Entertainment, Tracy Chapman’s self titled, Dramarama’s Cinema Verite, etc) because the artists are both still figuring out who they are and also taking their backlog of killer road material and committing it to vinyl. There are a lot of really good songs here, and even the middling ones are brightened by great harmonies, excellent interplay between the guitars and keyboards, and sterling production values. I have to admit: I really underestimated Toto. I won’t do it again.

Next time: We finish up with Journey. Stay tuned!

  1. I have never understood how smitten millennials are with this song. I thought it was catchy/dumb when it came out (emphasis on dumb), and quickly grew tired of hearing it on top 40 radio, which played it all the damn time. It would be an instant skip for me now, but I’m sure everyone in my vicinity would outwardly groan the moment I attempted to change it. I hear it’s a frequently requested singalong at high school dances these days. Word of warning: avoid the Weezer cover at all costs. ↩︎
  2. Somewhat relevant side note: I remember buying Bossanova by the Pixies, and how excited I was to hear it, since Doolittle was maybe my favorite album of 1989. I put my cassette(!) in the stereo, and waited. The first track was “Cecilia Ann,” a surf-rock instrumental. My excitement dimmed faster than a kid realizing he used his last ticket at the carnival. The rest of the album was better than that opener, but it never fully recovered. ↩︎

Lining Up The Dinosaurs: Foreigner’s Double Vision

 And we’re back! This time, we are tackling Foreigner’s sophomore album, Double Vision.

Double Vision

Preconceived Notions: Foreigner always struck me as the bad boys of arena rock. They had a tougher sound than REO or Styx, and their lyrics and general persona gave off a vibe approaching callous indifference1. They were also a band you couldn’t escape—Foreigner had ten songs in the top 20 of the Billboard charts between 1977 and 1981. To me, Foreigner were just that—a singles band—and I never had much interest in exploring their albums. As for the singles? They were…fine. They folded seamlessly into an hour of classic rock radio on your car stereo without making you want to immediately reach for the tuner knob, which is worth something. Occasionally, in snippets, they transcended themselves—like the saxophone solo in “Urgent,” or the last 1:11 of “Cold as Ice2,”-and you wondered if they had the capacity for greatness. Unfortunately, you never ended up wondering for very long.

Merch I Owned: Records, of course. That was their greatest hits album, before they hit Mushville with “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Records is a relatively skinny comp—ten songs— but at least half of them are pretty damn good3.  I had a dubbed cassette copy of 4 at one point, but the only deep track whose melody comes to me without checking is “Break It Up,” which features great 80’s keyboards.

Miscellany: Foreigner were originally going to be named Trigger, which is at least as dumb as the name they settled on. And one of the keyboard players for their first three albums is Ian McDonald, who was the keyboard player for King Crimson (!) on their first album and a guest musician on Red. Go listen to McDonald play alto saxophone on “Starless,” and then tell me how the hell he ended up here.

Track by Track:

Hot Blooded-This is one of the songs on Records I never cared for. The power chords are crunchy enough, but repetitive to the point of ridiculousness. And the lyrics, um, suck. It’s basically one long bad attempt to seduce a woman—lots of sneering come-on lines, like the guy in the bar you wish would finish his drink and go on home. I guess the music actually compliments the lyrics well, because you’re ready for the song to end long before it does, too.

Blue Morning, Blue Day—Foreigner, like a lot of arena rock bands, tend to start with a catchy (or sometimes not so catchy) riff and pound it in to the ground. This is one of the catchier ones4.  Foreigner also frequently write about their girlfriend problems. This being the 70’s, that equates to petulant complaints of mistreatment— the “you’ve done me wrong, you just don’t understand me” school of songwriting. Unless you enjoy that sort of thing, I would suggest ditching the lyric sheet for most of this album.

You’re All I Am—It’s Slow Dance Time! The music is standard 70’s Prom and the verses are lousy with cliches, but Lou sings this one well. The chorus at least changes tempo and goes for a Billy Joel feel. And the dueling guitars on the bridge are nice— almost like they’re slow-dancing too.

Back Where You Belong— I like the beginning, especially the guitar interplay, but here the chorus sucks. It goes back to the verses for an extended thing, which is nice. I like the use of acoustic guitars throughout. The lyrics are more misogynistic claptrap. This is worse than the Eagles— geez, they have woman problems! Even so, this is probably the best deep cut so far.

Love Has Taken Its Toll—This has a swagger, a little boogie to it. Again, all of their songs are about how shitty they treat women. This is cock rock, but is isn’t dangerous—it’s actually a little bland. The chorus, again, is weaker than the verse, which is unfortunate, since a memorable chorus is probably the most important part of a traditionally structured song. Lyrically, this is basically a less charming version of AC/DC’s “Shot Down in Flames.” Most interesting5 is the abbreviated bridge, which features a saxophone and a melody that reminds me of The Carpenters “Yesterday Once More.” I honestly love The Carpeneters, but I’m guessing that’s not what Foreigner were going for here.

Double Vision—a pretty good song about pot. The song showcases one of Foreigner’s best talents— backing vocals—and the guitars crunch nicely for a change. Lou sings this one with some passion, but ultimately it’s the guitar riff and the harmonizing that you’ll remember.

Tramontane—an instrumental. Sounds like Alan Parsons with more guitars. Unlike most of the other songs on the album, this one was written by one of the two keyboard players (Greenwood), while the King Crimson guy (McDonald) plays a lyricon (an electronic wind instrument) that I’m guessing is making the cool high tones on the song, like something out of a 70’s science fiction show. It says something that it’s my favorite thing on the album so far.

I Have Waited So Long—Again, the lyrics blow. The laziest received rhymes you can think of. The music is minimalist slow dance for much of the song, or  “Let’s just play the same chord for three minutes, howzabout?” if you want to be a little harsher. It does get better in the end— a little saxophone always makes things better.

Lonely Children—Foreigner do crunchy guitars and swanky guitars. This has both. And a social conscience? Sort of, in a ham-fisted fashion. I believe this is about teen runaways, but lines like “They may detest you, someday they may arrest you” isn’t going to win any Grammys. This song is just more evidence Mick Jones should not have written song lyrics.

Spellbinder— Turns out Lou has women problems, too. This is Foreigner’s version of Cliff Richard’s “Devil Woman.” And Richard’s song is better. I will say though, we have keyboards and a few strings and more stuff here—probably because it’s the album closer. Not awful.

Final Impressions/Evaluation: Despite the temptation to write something snarky6, I think it’s fair to point our that Double Vision is fuller and more musically interesting than the REO album I listened to for the last review. You Can Tune A Piano… has better hits than Foreigner has here, but I much prefer the deep tracks on Double Vision, especially on side 2. The songs here are pretty back-loaded, where most of the good stuff shows up when the songs are about over. If the buildups to these tunes was a little less meh, I could heartily recommend this album— as long as you paid absolutely no attention to the lyrics. Unfortunately, you have to listen to a lot of humdrum openers to get to the 30-45 seconds of richer, busier music at the end of a lot of these tracks. Maybe Foreigner eventually learned to write complete songs, but I doubt it; like REO, they embraced woozy ballads in the Eighties, and I quit paying attention7.

  1.  That appealed to me a lot more when I was fourteen than it does now. ↩︎
  2. There are few moments in music I like as much as the end of “Cold as Ice.” The keyboard riff melds with the harmonies and Lou Gramm’s voice, and then the strings kick in like the long-awaited fulfillment of a promise. Foreigner never did anything as good as the last minute and change of this song. ↩︎
  3. Besides the aforementioned “Cold as Ice” and “Urgent,” I always really liked “Dirty White Boy,” one of the few times Foreigner really tried to put their foot on the gas. See, Foreigner rarely rocked—they preferred to glide, guitar and keyboard riffs a little too sanded-down and slow to truly feel like rock and roll. “Dirty White Boy” is one exception. So is “Juke Box Hero,” which is so over-the-top it borders on parody ↩︎
  4. Although there are plenty of guitar licks all over Foreigner’s songs, I almost never find the guitars catchy. The earwormy Foreigner tunes are either keyboard-heavy or feature a saxophone. “Blue Morning” has an insistent keyboard bit that sticks in my head and makes me forget the whiny lyrics here. ↩︎
  5.  I said interesting. I didn’t say good. ↩︎
  6. “Not great, Bob!” comes to mind… ↩︎
  7. One exception: the Lou Gramm solo rocker “Midnight Blue.” a memorable song that is both a) catchy as hell, and b) not about a woman. Thank God. ↩︎

Lining Up The Dinosaurs: REO Speedwagon’s You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tune A Fish

We continue with our brief series on 70’s arena rock, staying in the Midwest to hang with the favorite sons of Champaign, Illinois, Reo Speedwagon.

You Can Tune A Piano, But You Can’t Tune A Fish

Preconceived Notions: When I was growing up, everyone in my general vicinity loved REO. Their guitarist, Gary Richrath, was born in the same town I was, and grew up ten minutes driving distance from where I live now. I’ve heard first-hand stories from people who insisted they partied with Gary in the early seventies. REO were hometown boys made good, and it wouldn’t matter if their collected output sounded like The Shaggs— Central Illinois was going to love ‘em.
I distinctly remember getting a dubbed cassette of A Decade of Rock And Roll from my mother in my early teens. This was soon traded out for a vinyl copy, bought for a birthday or somesuch. Everyone assumed I would like this stuff, I suppose. And Decade is pretty likable— a lovingly assembled greatest hits collection that didn’t have any hits on it1. Scanning the tracklist now, I see a half dozen songs that I would classify as pretty good, and most of those were culled from the more recent albums at that time. That should bode well for You Can Tune A Piano, since it is one of those recent albums with better “singles.”
Side Note: I am aware that High Infidelity songs were all over the radio in 1980, years before I even got a copy of Decade. Somehow I never equated the band that did “Keep On Loving You” with the elevated bar band that ended up in my record collection—they felt like two different groups to me. Still do.


Merch I Have Owned: see above. I never got beyond A Decade of Rock and Roll, and was highly allergic to everything the band did after Hi Infidelity, especially the noxious “In My Dreams,” which inexplicably made it to number 19 on the Billboard Top 40 in 1987.


Miscellany: The video for REO’s 1980 hit “Keep on Loving You” is on my list of The Ten Stupidest Videos of All Time. We not only get the casual misogyny and extremely poor production values2 that were endemic of videos from that time, we also are graced with Kevin Cronin’s complete inability to act. In today’s age, where every pop star seems to be an ex-Disney actor or a YouTube discovery, it’s easy to forget how ill-equipped a lot of rock stars were to be performers at the dawn of the video age.


Track by Track:
Roll With the Changes— From the jump, you can tell these guys have been playing with each other for a long time. This is tight. I enjoy the rolling piano riff, the harmonies, and that the lyrics feature a metaphor or two. The solos all work very well, and are integrated seamlessly into the song. Gary Richrath was a much flashier guitarist than anybody in Styx, and he plays well off the other instruments. This might be the height of hard-rockin’ REO, where they show what all those years of touring have accomplished.

Time For Me to Fly— We are two for two! The first verse with the acoustic guitar and spacey keyboard is a singalong, as is the chorus. Kevin Cronin doesn’t have a great voice, but by God, he might have the most sincere voice in 70’s rock. This feels like the first big ballad the band ever did, even if it never hit the Top 40— this was the blueprint for all the hits that were coming soon, even including the “why do I have to put up with this shit from you” lyrical theme that is prevalent in so many REO songs3. I could dock it a notch for being a precursor to a load of swoony crap, but this is still a great REO song.
.
Running Blind— Part of the problem with REO is their lack of imagination. This song sounds like a carbon copy of a song that comes later in the album4, and half a dozen other songs in their discography. Standard uptempo rocker, lyrics you won’t remember as soon as the song ends, samey samey boring blather.

Blazing Your Own Trail Again— The verses are “Time for Me to Fly” and the chorus is “Crimson and Clover”. I mean, the exact same chords. Tommy James could’ve probably sued. Worst song so far.

Sing to Me—Back to A Decade of Rock n Roll: A song on there I remember liking was “Lightning,” a slightly spookier version of “Time For Me to Fly”. And here we have an inferior attempt at the same song. Really bad, but at least it’s short, and Richrath’s guitar solo isn’t bad.

Lucky for You— at least this one doesn’t immediately remind me of another REO song. However, the lyrics are extraordinarily dumb5, there’s a hoedown on the bridge, and the only memorable thing in the song is Richrath’s guitar playing. I bet he hated the move to pop shit. I guess there is some nice honkeytonk piano here, too— I think the song was simply a vehicle for solos. I can appreciate that more than REO continually copying off their own test paper.

Do You Know Where Your Woman Is Tonight— These 70’s rock guys were super paranoid and sorely lacking in lyrical imagination. I know that lots of 70’s songs are about worrying that your lover is unfaithful, but that seems to be a feature of so much of REO’s catalog. Maybe don’t tour so damn much, guys. Stay home. Pay attention to your partner, huh? This song is slight, over quickly, unmemorable, what my wife would call a filler track.

The Unidentified Flying Tuna Trot— Solos, solos, solos. Even this is a tip of the cap to another instrumental off their last album. You know what killed REO? They only knew how to write two songs, and they filled their later albums with imperfect clones of those songs.

Say You Love Me or Say Goodnight—I liked this better on Decade, where it wasn’t surrounded by songs that sound a great deal like it. It rolls along nicely, a rollicking bar band type of number, but it really feels like REO had three good songs for this album and filled the rest of it up with crap they dashed off in an hour.

Final Impressions/Evaluation: To be honest, this album would work better as a 45— put “Time For Me to Fly” on side A, and “Roll With the Changes” on the flip side. That gives you two great songs, and points you in the direction REO would travel over their next handful of albums. Nothing else on You Can Tune A Piano (save the last song) is really memorable or worth repeated listens.
On his YouTube channel, Robert Fithen frequently mentions that his favorite albums are those where there is a wide array of styles and approaches. I would agree with him. Not to sound like a broken record 6, but my old copy of A Decade of Rock and Roll had much more variety and points of interest. Even when the songs stumbled, they didn’t all sound like they were spliced from the same tune, like we have here. Reo Speedwagon might have figured out the path to mainstream success on You Can Tune A Piano, but it’s a road with limited excitement and few surprises.

  1. No song on Decade made the Billboard Top 40. The closest was “Time For Me To Fly,” which hit number 56. ↩︎
  2. I could have shot a better-looking video on my cell phone. ↩︎
  3. See “Take it on the Run,” “Keep on Loving You,” “In Your Letter,” et al. ↩︎
  4. “Say You Love Me or Say Goodnight,” which I was familiar with from A Decade of Rock and Roll. ↩︎
  5. “Love in the air and the wind in my hair is makin’ me real.” What?! ↩︎
  6. Maybe the copycat nature of this album has infiltrated my brain. ↩︎

Lining Up The Dinosaurs: Styx’s Pieces of Eight

          My favorite music podcast (and one of my regular listening pleasures) is Dischord and Rhyme. Every two weeks, a rotating cast of reviewers dissect a classic album track by track. It’s insightful, funny, and entertaining as hell, and I would encourage you to head quickly to the podcast center of your choice and subscribe. 

     My podcast enjoyment got me to wondering: could I do something with a similar format, but in print form? Could I find some classic albums I wanted to break down, analyzing the individual songs as I went? Well, sure, but what if I instead decided to look at a bunch of probably crummy arena-rock albums from the 70’s and analyzed those?

     Ahem. Today, then, we commence with a brief series where I will examine, er, classic arena rock albums from the halcyon year of 1978. These are all bands I am pretty familiar with, although I have never listened to the albums in question in their entirety (with one exception, soon to be noted). I will be upfront about any predisposed notions I might have about any of these bands, and hope to listen to these albums with an unbiased ear. When I’m done, just for giggles, I will rank the reviewed albums. 

     Everyone still here? All right, let’s get started!1

Styx-Pieces of Eight

     Preconceived Notions: Let’s face it: Styx is impossible to take seriously. They do a few things well— they can harmonize, they mix up their musical palette (some), they are earnest and try hard— but there is a John Ritter-falling-down-the-stairs quality to their music that makes one want to point and laugh. Case in point: my wife called me not long ago from her car, exasperated. “Have you heard this song, ‘Lady,’ by Styx? It’s the worst song I’ve ever heard!” When I stopped laughing, I started crooning it to her over the phone while she pleaded for me to stop.2 Thing is, I wasn’t surprised she hated it, (even though I’ve always felt it had a certain cheesy charm) because Styx is ridiculous. They are the prototypical C student trying to be an A student and falling on their collective faces.

     Merch I Have Owned: I had a copy of Paradise Theatre on vinyl when I was in high school. I’m guessing someone gave it to me for Christmas, or something. I listened to it, because you listen to everything you own when you only have about thirty albums. It’s probably instructive that I listened to Tormato by Yes more frequently and enjoyed it more.

     Miscellany: Styx recorded their third album, The Serpent is Rising, at a little studio in South Pekin, Illinois, just a stone’s throw from where I live. The album is all over the place (it ends with a rendition of The Hallelujah Chorus), and contains a song, “As Bad As This,” that halfway through becomes perhaps the worst novelty song in the history of novelty songs. You’ve been warned.

     Track-By-Track:3

      Great White Hope— Guitarist James Young was usually only given one song per album, and this is his contribution to Pieces of Eight. Like his previous songs “Put Me On” and “Miss America,” it features crunchy guitars, Young shout-singing the lyrics, and repetition of a key phrase4 so many times you want to run screaming into the street. The keyboards have a tootly sound that are endemic of almost every Styx song, the rolling drums are supposed to mimic being in a boxing ring, and the whole thing is pretty forgettable. I give Young credit for attempting to fashion an extended metaphor, at least.

     I’m O.K. — The unfortunate thing about this song is it’s a little earworm-y. Why unfortunate? Because the lyrics are such over the top, Up With People, Stuart Smalley-esque claptrap5 you will wish to God you could quit humming it. Styx throws everything at this song— a memorable chorus, the aforementioned nice harmonies, organ, more of the happy-pixie keyboard sound, a not-bad guitar solo, and a big finish. It sounds like the old “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coke commercial from the 70’s if everyone was high on ecstasy. I can’t say I hate it.

     Sing For the Day— Um, sorry, but this song blows. Three songs in, and I want to send the keyboard player on an errand and break all his equipment. It also sounds (to my ears) like Styx is cribbing from one of the hits off their last album, “Fooling Yourself,” except this song is far, far worse. Tommy Shaw has never been my favorite vocalist (he really sounds whiny), and the lyrics are based on one of the stupidest conceits in the history of recorded music. You see, Shaw is writing the song to a girl named Hannah (he uses her name six times in the course of the song), but Hannah isn’t his wife or his girlfriend or a groupie he met in Philadelphia. No, Hannah is, per Wikipedia, a name he used to …represent his fans. He calls his fans “Hannah.” I used to think Paul McCartney was pretty silly to write a song to his dog (“Martha, My Dear,” although McCartney would deny it later). Compared to Tommy Shaw, old Paulie was Voltaire.

     The Message/Lord of the Rings— I’m counting these as one song, because “The Message” isn’t really a song, and barely even qualifies as a musical interlude— it’s just a minute of keyboard sound effects, the sort of exercise you wouldn’t see a band today bothering to put on an album (or a streaming service, or a defunct MySpace page). “Lord of the Rings” isn’t much better. The lyrics are third-rate epic fantasy bullshit, and the music is a watered down version of Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge,” which means more keyboards and less guitars. Styx should have realized this was ridiculous and leaned into that, but this is too straight-faced to be camp, and too poorly done to be enjoyable. It’s also a very odd choice for a side closer— this is what you want listeners to resonate with as the music stops? Doesn’t matter as much in the streaming age, where album sides don’t matter, and things will get better in a hurry.

     Blue Collar Man (Long Nights) — I have to quote Wikipedia again: “the music (for this song) was composed by Shaw after hearing the sound of his motor boat engine when it failed to start. He said it sounded like a good riff to a song.” Insert eye-roll emoji here. Despite such inauspicious beginnings, I can understand why Styx made this the first single off the album. The sputtering keyboard riff is memorable, the lyrics (about being down-and-out but having self-respect) are admirable, and the guitar solo on the bridge is one of the better ones on the album. Everyone plays well (and together) here, and the signature Styx harmonies are one enjoyable element of the song instead of the only reason to finish listening to it.

     Queen of Spades— This one start with a pretty acoustic guitar riff,  some spacey keyboards, and Dennis DeYoung’s croon. As Dennis gets more worked up about the girl who done him wrong the song follows suit— more guitars, harmonies that approach Queen levels of excellence, and one of DeYoung’s best vocal performances— he really sings the hell out of the song, even adding a spoken “Ha ha ha, you lose!” I love the guitar soloing near the end (Young? Shaw?), the return of the acoustic guitar bit from the beginning (symmetry and all that), and the slightly-ominous6 keyboard fills at the close of the song. This has always been my favorite Styx song, and the only one I have ever burned to a mix cd. 

     Renegade— And we are three for three. This may very well be my second favorite Styx song, and is definitely the best thing Shaw ever wrote7. It’s hard to believe the same guy who wrote “Blue Collar Man” and this song also wrote “Sing For The Day”8, but Shaw was never a model of consistency (see: Damn Yankees). Doesn’t matter, ‘cause here he’s doing very nicely, thank you. I like the beginning with just Shaw’s voice (and the tom thump like a heartbeat), I love when the band kicks in, and Young’s guitar solo is almost as good as the one in “Queen of Spades.” Shaw does a nice job creating a character (an escaped convict soon to be captured), and he sings the song with passion. This is a fan favorite, too, and is typically the last encore song at Styx’s concerts. Of course, DeYoung hasn’t been in the band in twenty-five years, so this might simply be the most-liked song someone other than Dennis would sing. 

     Pieces of Eight— This is the climax of the album, the big showstopper. And DeYoung sings it as such. Unfortunately, the band and the arrangement is pretty flat, and it comes off sounding more forced than anything. I appreciate the sentiment (money isn’t everything), but this feels like paint-by-numbers Styx. I would be surprised if this was anyone’s favorite Styx song.

     Aku-Aku— Styx should stop making instrumentals. This meanders for almost three minutes, shows no virtuosity, repeats itself, and eventually fades out. Thanks, Styx.

     Final Impressions/Evaluation: This is much better than I thought it was going to be. Side one is pretty forgettable, but side two is solid, and contains a couple of Styx’s best songs. I haven’t ever ventured far into Styx’s catalog (and this review is about as close as I plan to get), but this album is much better than my memories of either Paradise Theater or Kilroy Was Here. If someone wanted to know what Styx sounded like, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Next time we review those monsters of the Midwest, REO Speedwagon! Good times.

  1.  I  placed these reviews in ascending order, starting with the album/band I assumed I would like least, since I usually want to get the most unpleasant chores out of the way first. We’ll see if that holds. ↩︎
  2. This is a woman who once said “Money” by Pink Floyd made her want to throw things at her stereo. And this was a worse song! ↩︎
  3. Full disclosure: this is the only album of the group I am going to review here that I have previously heard in its entirety. Granted, that was nearly forty years ago, and my recollections are hazy. ↩︎
  4. In this case: Lookit me, I’m the great white hope! ↩︎
  5. Remember Up With People? No? How about Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character, a highlight from an SNL era with skits that didn’t feel written by Miss Fonseca’s junior high science class? Still foggy? Well, then… get off my lawn! ↩︎
  6. Styx never did anything really ominous. This may be as close as they ever got, unless you count “Snowblind” from Paradise Theater, which ends with singing that reminds one of The Amityville Horror. On a song about cocaine. ↩︎
  7. Some would instead pick “Too Much Time On My Hands,” but I’ve never cared for that song and its farting keyboards. ↩︎
  8. It is easy to believe that Shaw wrote both “Sing For The Day” and “She Cares,” a tune off the second side of Paradise Theater. I found “She Cares” unlistenable over forty years ago, and can still remember how viscerally I hated that song even now. Just scanning the tracklist of Paradise Theater makes me realize what an endurance test side two of that album is. ↩︎

You Had Me At Hello

“One, two, three, four”
It’s the first thing you hear when you start the track: a clipped British voice, low in the mix, counting. But only for a moment— then the guitars rush in, anxious, like they’re late for work. The bass lick shows up first, followed by a blurt of lead guitar, back and forth. Beneath it all a kick drum alternates with a hi-hat/cymbal combo, a herky-jerky rhythm that repeats throughout the song. By the time George Harrison shows up ten seconds in complaining about the government taking all his money, you can’t stop listening. It’s the start of “Taxman,” of course, and one of the greatest hooks in the history of recorded music.
Some songs are like that— you know seconds in that this one is going to be a banger, an instant playlist add, a new favorite. And since we are at the start of something new here1, I thought it would be appropriate to look at a few songs I loved from the very beginning.

“Smells Like Team Spirit”-Nirvana This is one of those songs where I knew exactly where I was when I first heard it. I was working at a group home (second shift, reserving my day hours for college classes) and all the residents had gone to sleep, leaving me alone in the office. I had a little clock radio on a shelf to keep me company while I churned out progress notes or caught up on my homework. I usually kept the radio dialed to a classic rock station, and that’s what the first few strums of “Spirit” sound like— classic rock, someone practicing an unplugged mutant variant of Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” in their bedroom. But then the drums hit, sounding all the world like someone kickstarting a motorcycle, and I stopped what I was doing and listened. The combined roar of the guitars, the muted chords which made the little “chicka-chicka” noise you hear throughout, the louder/quieter/louder dynamic Cobain cribbed from the Pixies—I loved all of it, immediately. It certainly didn’t hurt that radio music was in a bit of the doldrums2, and “Spirit” felt exciting, felt new (even if it wasn’t— Cobain was more of a synthesist than an innovator, and wore his influences on his sleeve). There was an urgency here that was unlike what I was hearing in music at the time. The first thirty seconds of “Spirit” got me (and everybody else) to purchase Nevermind, and the grunge explosion quickly followed. “Spirit” isn’t my favorite Nirvana song, or even in my top five, but it is the song that hooked me and made me a fan.

“Dreams”—Fleetwood Mac I didn’t know for years what this song was called. I saw a copy of Rumors at my aunt’s house and didn’t connect the radio hit with the title. But I loved “Dreams” from the first triad of drum notes. The beginning of this song is all drum and bass notes (for five seconds anyway), then a mournful keyboard, then Stevie. There’s a sparseness to the beginning of this song I adore, a sense of space—the beginning sounds like it hangs in the air. It is all immaculately produced3, Stevie provides one of her best lyrics, and Lindsay Buckingham’s backing harmonies are perfect. But what puts it over is the little hiccup in the bass (right where Stevie sings “wrap around your dreams”) in the second verse of the song. It is one of my favorite grace notes in one of my favorite songs4.


“Breakdown”—Tom Petty Another song that starts with a drum lick. You would think the drum was in an empty room, except for the barely there bass beneath it in the mix. Then two piano notes, a guitar riff a second later, and eventually Petty, who doesn’t stroll in until 30 seconds in, with one of the best narrative hooks in music: “It’s alright if you love me; it’s alright if you don’t.”5 I also loves how he uses “afraid” and “away” as a slant rhyme, but that’s the English major in me talking, I suppose. “Breakdown” is the first song that comes to mind when I think about songs with only one verse6— Petty says what he has to say and gets out, the rest of the song trailing him out the door.

“Fake Plastic Trees”—Radiohead Thom Yorke, three seconds in: “A green plastic watering can, for a fake Chinese rubber plant.” Yes, there’s a few guitar strums first, but the beginning of “Fake Plastic Trees” is all about Yorke’s voice, which I’ve always felt sounded both pretty and desperately lonely at the same time. Eventually we get guitar solos and big strings like the end of some sad movie (perhaps set in a supermarket, like the now iconic video). Unlike Nirvana, who tend to alternate loud and soft parts, Radiohead frequently go for the build, gradually adding musical elements until you have a big finish. It all works here. This was the first Radiohead song that really landed with me; they have since become one of my favorite bands.

“I’m Not in Love” —10cc There is nothing at the start of this track for four seconds, then that wordless ahhh (accompanied quickly by a keyboard) that swells and swells until 36 seconds, when the singer starts. I have a thing for wordless choirs7, and this is my favorite. Yes, Eric Stewart’s lyrics are clever (most of 10cc’s lyrics were clever), and the theme of lovelorn denial is one I appreciate. But it’s that haunting choir that I’ve loved ever since I first heard it on my little portable radio when I was a child. Nothing else 10cc ever did would resonate as much as “I’m Not In Love,” but it doesn’t matter—this is my favorite song, and has been for fifty years. All it took were the first few notes.

 

    1. Hi. I’m Greg. Welcome to my music blog. ↩︎
    2. Case in point: the number one song on the pop charts the week “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released was “Every Thing I Do (I Do It For You)” by Brian Adams. ↩︎
    3. This is my candidate for the best produced track in the history of recorded music. ↩︎
    4. But is it my favorite Fleetwood Mac song? “Beautiful Child” would probably having something to say about that, and is another Mac song with amazing harmonies. ↩︎
    5. Yes, I punctuated the sentence correctly— I can hear the semicolon in Petty’s delivery, even with the pause between the lines. ↩︎
    6. The Smiths don’t count, because most of their songs are only one verse that Morrissey keeps repeating. ↩︎
    7. Other songs with great wordless choirs: “Just The Way You Are” by Billy Joel, “Star Me Kitten” by R.E.M. (a 10cc homage), and “Holding On To Yesterday” by Ambrosia (if only for just a few seconds) ↩︎