Popcorn Culture
Ruminations on TV Shows, Comics, And Music
When I started down the Blink-182 rabbit hole, I didn't expect much. The band started out heavily problematic but ages into boring. I knew this. Sure, they had some tracks here and there that I liked but seven albums and an ep worth? Well...no. I knew the first two Angels & Airwaves albums pretty well, and assumed I would get two full albums out of their entire discography. It turned out to be one and a half. We'll do their first reimagined album, which is almost long enough to be a double album in this post. In the next post, they get a split album, something Angels And Airwaves never did during their career but Blink-182 did twice. It's when an album is shared by two related bands. They'll split the next one with Simple Creatures. I hadn't even heard of Simple Creatures until a few hours ago. This was my loss. Much like Box Car Racer, they don't have a full album worth of awesome but they have enough material for an EP. In their case, though, I'm giving them the second half of the split album since Angel And Airwaves has one of Blink's lead singers and Simple Creatures has the other. I also hadn't given a fair listen to Blink 182's output during the years that Tom DeLonge left the band for Angels And Airwaves. It's a solid, if short, album that's also coming up in the next post. Basically, my ignorance was of the side projects and the alternate frontman, Matt Skiba from Alkaline Trio...no, I'm not including Alkaline Trio in this discography nor am I likely to get to their own discography anytime soon. For this post, I present you with the grandoise double albumy Angel And Airwaves, and the EP length Heart's All Gone which showcases how exhausted the band was when they parted ways for a bit. It's a great EP but it's culled from some lifeless music that was neither very poppy nor very punky. I'm glad the members refreshed, got some side projects done, and were able to come back for their impending One More Time album. IV. Angels And Airwaves 1. I was in a friend's car, on the way back from a poetry show when I heard a song on the radio that I thought might be a new U2 song until the vocals came in. "Is that the guy from Blink-182?" I asked, incredulously. "Yea," my friend Brian said, "he's all classic rock now." Sure enough, in the interviews at the time he's constantly comparing himself to Pink Floyd, Nirvana, U2, and other bands that Angels And Airwaves is clearly influenced by. I, uh, I like Angels And Airwaves but I don't think they'll ever be in my top fifty favorite bands. They are, however, a very interesting evolution of Blink-182's sound. There's a military and space motif to this album, so a Call To Arms is a great place to start. It's got some Edge-like (the U2 guitarist) effect but the band doesn't sound at all derivative here, they sound like they're earnestly trying to sound epic, and they have the talent potential to maybe make it there. 2. Sirens muddies the sound a bit before some sharp guitar riffs cut through, and DeLonge's nose (that's mostly what he sings through) lets you know that the impending war metaphors are really about loving a girl and life being hard, which tracks with most of his songwriting. 3. & 4. DeLonge clearly has a narrative to the Angels And Airwaves albums. And while I can follow their themes, they're a bit repetetive for me to invest the time to research. Basically, though, there is a war...which is love...which is war, and the moon is somehow involved. The Moon Atomic apologizes for whatever it is that happened during the war that it somehow impacted the damned moon. The War lets us know that it wasn't just the moon and the tides that we destroyed, the ocean is on fire and lots of soliders are dead. DeLonge offers them no apologies, though. (Psst...don't worry, though, this is still a metaphorical war about someone who doesn't love him enough anymore.) 5. & 6. The thing about love is It Hurts. And since Sherri (oh, she gets a name!) cheated on our erstwhile narrative with her best friend. But the singer saw through it! Now he offers a Distraction to ... Sherri? Someone else he loves? It's unclear. But the song is very bouncy with more Edge guitar loops ringing beneath the surface. 7. & 8. Oh, oh oh, oh oh, oh oh, yo-oh. We've moved on to a new love interest who won him over in no time at all. The Gift of her love temporarily erases the whole war motif. But the gift is brief, soon we're back to being sad about war and the previous relationship during the messy but lyrics of the spacily catchy The Flight Of The Apollo. 9. Everything's Magic is our halfway point in this album, and it does something I enjoy. It asks more questions than it answers. To be fair, it mainly asks the same questions repeatedly. But I still enjoy it. 10. Inertia pushes us into the back half of the album. This track sounds like a B-side to one of U2's Unforgettable Fire b-sides. Right up until the climbing metal guitar riffs and nu-metal background effects. It's a distinct combo that pleasantly surprised me when I first heard it. 11. & 12. A little toy piano brings us back to apologizing for the war metaphor in Start The Machine. It drops us into some 80s drum tracks and synth loops in Breathe, which is a more overt love song tha anything we've encountered so far. The narrator not only says I love you he also entreats his love interest to come lay with me...until the end of time. 13. & 14. Wait...is the narrator a literal ghost? Is that why time seems to be shifting and he's constantly in love but also in war? Soul Survivor doesn't give any answers but I enjoy that it asks more questions. It's also very got a lovely bleep percussion, as does Lifeline, where DeLonge briefly drops his voice down an octave. 15. & 16. I'm sticking to the ghost narrator theory, since it makes it a little less creepy that he's been watching his love interest all her life in Clever Love. As the track's drum line fades out, we get more space effects and Edge-riffs for The Adventure but the lyrics about dreams and being willing to do anything to be with his love interest continue on. 17. & 18. Moon As My Witness, we're nearing the end here. We began with a call to arms, and we close out the album with a Surrender. It will shock you to learn that the surrender is to love. Oh oh oh oh oh / Yea ah oh oh oh oh oh / Yea ah oh oh oh oh oh / Yea ah oh oh oh oh oh (this time I feel it now) V. Heart's All Gone
1. The Angels And Airwaves was all about love and solitude and dealing with relationships as though they were a war, and comparing isolation to being in space. Well Blink-182's Heart's All Gone is about being exhausted by fame and your bandmates. Which DeLonge seems better qualified to write about. We open with After Midnight, which references falling to Earth (after being in space for the end of the last album?) and then coming home after a show arm in arm with the person you love. It's sweet and, while certainly more serious than anything after Enema Of The State, it would fit thematically with All Grown Up And no Place To Go. 2. There's a long instrumental lead-up to Heart's All Gone which oozes with what DeLonge was trying to do with Angels & Airwaves. It's a spare buildup and then we actually get a bit of a return to punk for what feels like the first time in aeons. It's one of those songs where a famous rock star accused of selling out sings about how a different rock star has sold out for fame. It's absolutely a logical song choice for this band that's definitely on the edge of breaking up. 3. DeLonge doesn't have a monopoly on anxiety and feelings of loneliness in the band. Mark Hoppus gives us his perspective in When I Was Young. 4. Another Girl Another Planet is the oldest song on this album by far. It's from one of their Greatest Hits albums. It's got that turn of the millenium Blink energy. It's fun and poppy. 5. Hoppus's bass line drags us into Disaster. It also has some Angels & Airwaves vibes right down to the guitar effects and vocal distortion. But it has Hoppus on vocals as well as DeLonge. It's probably the best melding of their voices both creatively and melodically on this album. 6. Kaleidoscope also has Hoppus on vocals. The bass and guitar reflect the sadness of Hoppus's vocals but Travis Barker's perfect pop punk drums just refuse to let the listener be mopey. 7. Given their origin, and the lecherous nature of many rock stars, you wouldn't be wrong to be worried about a song called Pretty Little Girls by a band in their forties. But it's a song about being nineteen and in love with another nineteen year old and having one of those tumultuous relationships one has at nineteen when they're rock stars. Both of them age over the course of the song but he still refers to as a pretty little girl, which I'm going to just chalk up to habit and not creepiness. This is yet another track that has major Angels And Airwaves vibes right up until the rap verse out of nowhere by Yelawolf. 8. Snake Charmer climbs naturally out of the previous track. It's heavier and brings back some of that Nu-Metal synth loop influence that crept into the previous album. Plus a Cure-influenced guitar riff. See, it's not ALWAYS about The Edge. 9. We're barely a half hour into this album and we're done. Fighting Gravity is a lovely mess of noise about leaving someone behind. And that's about to happen, as Blink-182 and DeLonge go their separate ways between this track and my next post.
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Blink-182 hit it big on MTV during the summer of Boy Bands, 1999. It was a relief for me. I do greatly enjoy non-rock pop music, and I've grown to appreciate a few of the boy band songs that came out during that summer but it so saturated my music sources that I couldn't turn on a radio or TV without hearing about how rock and roll was dying. Which I've heard every year since. Rap is killing rock. R&B is killing rock. Reggaeton is killing rock. Sea shanties are killing rock. It's tiresome. While rock is probably my favorite genre, I would hate it if it was as omnipresent as boy bands were in 1999. Or if it was all one genre instead of a variety of subgenres lumped together. You know, like rap is a variety of subgenres lumped together and R&B is a a variety of subgenres lumped together (but not like Reggaeton or sea shanties, Reggaeton and sea shanties are subgenres). Because I had a roommate/parastic pseudo-boyfriend who found boy band videos arousing, I was grateful for any break in the melodramatic harmonizing. "All The Small Things" was the break I needed, and "What's My Age Again" was the perfect accompaniment to Lit's "My Own Worst Enemy" and Len's "Steal My Sunshine". It was a Sugar Ray/Smashmouth style, sun-drenched pop song about how growing up was tough. Written and performed by people in their twenties. Like I was. Since then, the band has evolved into something less frat rocky, and put out a bunch of side projects that sound like completely different bands but with the same nasally vocalist. I didn't really chart their trajectory mush as it happened. I moved onto other bands. But I heard their most recent single and thought "I wonder what they did inbetween." And then remembered how many Angels & Airwaves songs I heard on the radio in the early 2000s. I thought their musical output deserved a deep dive and a discography buuuuuuuut I didn't want to do six posts about Blink-182, so here is one post with three albums worth of material. Part two is in the works. I. Enema Of The State
The 1990s Blink-182 were crass frat boys making dick and fart jokes, asking women in their audiences to show them their breasts, and other immature things you can imagine a trio of skate pop punk wannabes with puka necklaces doing if they got famous in the late 90s. I don't want to celebrate that but I can't deny that's who they were. This first album culls the tracks I enjoyed from their 90s output, and interweaves them with some of their live show banter from the The Mark, Tom, And Travis Show live album. It's crude (though I did edit out the boob requests and the times when the band was pointing out people in trouble to security members) and not actually very funny but it's who the band was. Well, except Travis Barker who didn't participate outside of the occasional rimshot. 1. Time is a track off their demo album, Flyswatter. It starts off with acoustic strumming but when the drums hit it becomes surf punk. They do some very poppy background vocals that aren't going to show up anywhere else in the discography. It's a hard, fast, and fun song about punctuality. 2. & 3. The band's first hit, which I missed when it came out, even though it must have been playing on several of the stations I listened to, is Dammit. This is a typical 90s juvenile song about the end of a relationship and how it means they're growing up. This theme continues on Untitled. Don't worry, though, they're not growing up for a while. 4. Degenerate is stupid, poppy punk with juvenile lyrics about being badass. Musically, it's upbeat fun, lyrically it's homophobic misogynist trash but it only advocates violence against the protagonist, who is the homophobic, misogynist trash in question, so...swings and roundabouts? 5. A less problematic, but not entirely unproblematic, version of that song is Anthem. A song about wishing you were the ancient age of 21, you know, so you can buy alcohol. It's also about being a time bomb because living with your parents is Just Like Slavery. It's an entirely realistic teenage rebellion song from the 90s. 6. While all their songs from this era are pretty juvenile, some are surprisingly progressive for their era. Don't Leave Me is a breakup song where the girl who dumps him isn't villainized or pined over. She outgrows him (probably a short journey) and moves on. And while he's sad about it, he is also going to move on and be okay. 7. The second of the three megahits from this era, What's My Age Again is a very silly look at being a shitty twenty-something. 8. & 9. Another quasi-mature breakup song, Point Of View, tells a similar story to "Don't Love Me" but harder and faster. It's followed by Man Overboard, dedicated to Scott Raynor who got kicked out of the band during their first massive tour, and replaced by Travis Barker, who's been the drummer ever since. There's also a bunch of fun Aquabat references, as that was the band Barker was poached from. 10. & 11. & 12. A medley of stupid songs with penis references. Does My Breath Smell is generically lyriced dumbassery. All The Small Things is the third of the three megahits and a perfectly fun song about a supportive girlfriend. Country Song is dumb as shit and devolves into a brief cover of a song from South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut. 13. Josie is a distinct departure from the previous three songs. It's another catchy song about how the singer is kind a piece of shit but he has a supportive girlfriend whom he loves. 14. & 15. Another descent into juvenile humor. You can probably guess that from the title of Dick Lips that it's not going to be classy, But it's not about blowjobs or sexualizing anyone, it's another song about being a shitty dudebro who wants to escape his parents' tyranny. Dysentary Gary is another song about being shitty and wanting to protect girls from shittier guys. It's wildly dumb and problematic. Sort of a pedophile savior song with a catchier guitar hook than it deserves. 16. A nice contrast is the light humor of A New Hope, a love song to Prince Leia. It, shockingly, doesn't mention incest. I fix that by adding a minisong that does. 17. & 18. Fentoozler is a Who the fuck do you think you are rant about their immaturity act growing stale. Don't worry, though, we're Just About Done with your butt. 19. I'm Sorry about some of the lyric on this album, and I'm pretty sure the band is at this point, too. This song is yet another we've grown apart because at least one of us is maturing track. It's probably where I should have ended the album. But... 20. American Pie is a perfect place for a Blink-182 song, as it's also a 90s celebration of growing up that's filled with immature dick and fart jokes. Mutt showed up on the soundtrack. It's a song about a roommate who fucks a lot. I've been both the guy with the horny roommate, and I've been the horny roommate. I don't really miss my twenties that much, though. II. The Box Car Racer EP We got through twenty mostly immature songs in under an hour. This second album is just twenty minutes. It's a huge departure, musically and lyrically. But it's over before you know it. 1. All Systems Go is a generically lyriced anti-government song. Think: the weakest of Green Day lyrics with great drums and key/time signature changes. 2. & 3. & 4. The drums take over for a bit when we move to a song about jumping off a bulding. Elevator's first verse is from the point of view of the jumper, the second verse is from an observer. Tiny Voices is the screaming internal monologue of someone depressed and pessimistic about their future. Watch The World is a preview of the upcoming Angels & Airwaves album. It's musically melodramatic and different from everything that's come before it and, like the forementioned upcoming album, it's about watching the world burn. 5. & 6. Every Blink-182 album needs a love song. And I is this album's unrequited punk ballad. Cat Like Thief is the I'm shitty but I have a killer girlfriend track for this album, and it closes things off by chanting how he needs to not leave her. It features Rancid's Tim Armstrong on co-lead vocals! III. All Grown Up And No Place To Go 1. We're back to the familiar drums and guitar riffs of Blink-182. There's a bit too much Jesus in this help me political complaint that supposedly signifies maturity. I guess compared to "What's My Age Again", Anthem Part Two is "mature" but it's really reminiscent of that thirty-year-old friend trying to sound deep by repeating the headline statements of his smarter friends as though they were his own opinions. Or, it's like listening to a four-year-old semi-parroting his parents' complaints abiout the economy. It's definitely Blink-182. 2. & 3. On the other hand, I Miss You really is a more mature version of the Blink-182 love ballad. Although the way Tom Delonge describes how you're already the voice inside my yed (sic) doesn't really gel with the message. But it's a good feed into Asthenia which is musically more mature but lyrically still caught in the early 20's whiney I-miss-you-so-much-but-can-only-write-generic-lyrics-rather-than-honor-your-specific-personality headspace. Like much of this era of Blink, I wish they had a better lyricist and gave Mark Hoppus more time as the lead vocalist. 4. At least the band acknowledges their aging in Give Me One Good Reason. Instead of complaining about how mom and dad don't understand them, they're complaining about how moms and dads don't understand their kids. It's still kind of a dopey song that doesn't quite say what it thinks it's saying. 5. & 6. Snapping, bass drum, and a buzzier than usual guitar riff are a promising start to Violence. Even the first vocal verse promises a completely different musical experience, then DeLonge launches nasal cavity first into the chorus. It's still a nice departure from their usual fare. The piano outro is also...unexpected. I've followed it up with The Fallen Interlude. It's nearly instrumental, apart from a repeated line near the end. It's a welcome branch off their musical tree. 7. & 8. & 9. DeLonge returns to the forefront with I'm Lost Without You, which is a more wistful and melodic version of their usual ballad until the second verse hits when it becomes a Blink-182 ballad. Obvious, true to its title, never tries to be anything other than adolescent anger at an ex. There's an almost The Strokes vibes to Everytime I Look For You before, it too becomes a kind of generic Blink song about a girl. 10. Robert Smith from the bloody The Cure shows up at the beginning of All Of This, and his inclusion really mellows DeLonge's vocals. It's a nice blend. It's no lyrical anomaly to the album but it does have enough of a different instrumentation to hook me. 11. First Date could very well have been from Enema Of The State. I guess it's more focused on the anxiety of trying to make a first impression than they were capable of on that album but it's optimism and 90s skate punk aesthetic seems nostalgic for this era of the band. 12. Stay Together For The Kids puts Hoppus back on the mic for the verses on this track about being children of divorce. It's a bit melodramatic, for having been written by guys in their early 30s, but it's an accurate reflection on a common source of teenage angst. 13. We close out with an absolute throwback to the immaturity of the first album, as I've included the band's interpretation of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words routine, Family Reunion. The #1 song in the country this week was Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville", forty-six years after its original release. This is mostly to celebrate the life of one of the legitimately "good guys" in the music industry. An occasional pot smoking, cocktail swilling dad rocker who owned several businesses and by all accounts stood behind his employees in a way that should be taught to the soulless pieces of shit who own 90% of the businesses in The United States. Look up Jimmy Buffet and Hurricane Katrina for a ton of feel good stories. He's mostly known for his songs from the 70s and early 80s, when his tropically inspired rock was at its most marketable. But the truth is, he never stopped being an interesting songwriter, and his band only ever got better as it aged. I imagine most people, if they were going to make a multi album discography of Buffett would either lean in to this early work or else simply do their own personal version of "Songs You Know By Heart" (hey, I did that!) and then make a second album of everything after that. I understand that urge, and will probably make just three albums, the third being everything after 1996. This album exists because it contains the albums that came out during my high school and early college years when I was most easily influenced. I bought "Songs You Know By Heart" in high school because I had several friends, some coworkers from Cape Cod, some school friends from around the world, who loved him and exposed me to his most popular songs. I think that whole album was on the jukebox in my high school snack bar/performance venue. Then, a coworker took me to one of Buffett's live shows, and then I went to college in Florida. So this is the era I most listened to Buffett and am, thus more knowledgeable about it than any other point in his career. And I loved these albums. So please accept this as my "Songs I Know By Heart And Wish More People Knew All The Lyrics To." 1. After getting into Buffett mainly through the Songs You Know By Heart album, I hesitantly bought the first album released after I "discovered" him, Fruitcakes. Everybody's Got A Cousin In Miami is the delightful first song on the album that convinced me I was going to like his new work as much as his classics. It was bright and silly and made me wish I was drinking a virgin cocktail (I was underage.) It's kind of the perfect "Oh, did you know his career continued after his Greatest Hits album?" opening track.
2. The title track for this imaginary album isn't one that's stuck with me over the years. The lyrics are a little stupider than I usually like (I mean, what do you expect from a song called Mental Floss?) but they're refreshingly common man for someone who was incredibly wealthy by the time he wrote them. The harmonica playing off the steel drums is such an unusual combination that it adds a complexity that the song doesn't lyrically warrant. 3. Ballad Of Skip Wiley was made to sound famliar. The baseball stadium organ playing, the 1970s stage musical background vocals and riffs, the vocalist speaking over the bridge rather than singing. Surely, you've heard this song before, even if you don't know any of the words. This song is based on a novel from the 1960s about a reporter who loves his home state of Florida so much that he goes to extremes to protect its honor. I may have to track that book down. 4. I didn't include any of the songs from Buffett's Christmas Island album because I'm just not a fan of holiday music 360 days of the year. But I'm sure Buffett's take on December holiday songs are at least different from most rock or pop stars'. This isn't a December Holiday song, though. This is Buffett reminding you that you need to take some time off from work, and you should probably do it somewhere warm near an ocean. This might be the earliest reference Buffett makes to The Internet, which he suggests you take a break from. Musically, it's middle of the road Buffett, not a ton of creativity but the trumpet solo leading into the steel drum solo is a refreshing breeze of nostalgic air. 5. The early 20th century symphonic swell at the start of this song quickly quiets down to just guitar plucking, piano twinkling, and steel drums for Blue Heaven Rendez-Vous, which certainly has "My Blue Heaven" vibes, which I've been a proponent of ever since I fell in love with the same titled Steve Martin/Rick Moranis/Joan Cusack film that probably hasn't aged very well. This is just a simple mid-late twentieth century lounge number that could be found in any mediocre 80s or 90s romantic drama ... or a restaurant scene in a Muppets movie. I would love to hear Rowlf cover this. 6. Some soft drumbeats and guitars climb into this tropical soft rock declaration that Buffett never wants to be too famous so he's been Quietly Making Noise to achieve the level of fame he's most comfortable with. It's a sweet country fair sing-along style track. 7. The next track is a meditation on the importance of Buffett's songwriting, which makes it a good follow-up to "Quietly Making Noise." It also has some lyrics that remind you that no matter how wealthy and white Buffett and his followers tend to be, his politics are surprisingly liberal, if often absent from his work. Here he muses Are we destined to be ruled by a bunch of old white men/Who compare the world to football and are programmed to defend? Only Time Will Tell. 8. Fruitcakes is the longest track on this album, just a shade longer than the opening track. It's one of his songs referencing his book Where Is Joe Merchant?, specifically the rocket scientist, Desdemona. This is a delightfully silly song bemoaning political, religious, romantic, and scientific excess. It's also a powerful revolutionary song demanding the return of Junior Mints to theaters. 9. If there's a Whiter, Soft Rockier concept than Jimmy Buffett covering a James Taylor song, I haven't heard it. I was unfamiliar with the original until I heard this version. It's a daydream about life would be like in Mexico as imagined/written/sung by someone who's never been there, but would like to. It's then infused with a bunch of references to Buffett songs and stories. 10. I remember hearing the story of how Jimmy Buffett, Bono, and Bono's family were in a plane in Jamaica that was shot at by police who suspected it was a drug-running plane. Jamaica Mistaica is Buffett's processing of the event from his perspective with a chorus from the perspective of the apologietic Jamaican police begging them to come back/come back/come back to Jamaica, promising that the next time they fly there they won't shoot (them) outta the sky. 11. The Night I Painted The Sky is a piano ballad about being a kid and watching a Fourth of July fireworks display. Super simple, and sweet. With a harmonica solo. 12. Lage Nom Ai is a song I loved from the first time I heard the Barometer Soup album, but whose name I could never remember. The title is an integral part of the chorus, and is from the French Caribbean Patois, meaning "the man who gave up his own name", which the song reminds the listener repeatedly. 13. Shortly after Buffett's passing, I saw a couple of his videos where his daughter, Delaney, interviews him about some of his lesser-known songs. The first video I clicked on was him reminiscing about Delaney's childhood where he specifically talks about how she chase(d) cats through Roman ruins/stomps on big toadstools, and about a party where Delaney Talks To Statues and otherwise behaves like an endearingly weird child. It's like a slightly less saccharine version of Billy Joel's "Lullaby (Goodnight, My Angel)." 14. The second cover on the album is a steel drum version of The Grateful Dead's Uncle John's Band. It's to his credit that I like this song, as I'm not a big fan of The Grateful Dead's music. But this is a direct, lyric-centric cover of one of the jam band's most famous songs. 15. The 90s were the decade of The Hidden Track at the end of the CD. Treetop Flyer is Buffett's hidden track from Banana Wind. It's a Stephen Sills solo track (I didn't know Stills had solo albums until I did a deep dive on this track) from his debut album. It's slightly more country rock than Buffett usually leans but the lyrics about flying low to not get caught certainly harkens back to "Jamaica Mistaica," which was on the same album. 16. Lone Palms sounds like it would be more at home on Songs You Know By Heart. It's a smooth ballad about tropical living. It doesn't stretch Buffett's 70s/80s sensibilities. Even the lyrics seem more like his stoic 20s & 30s then the material he was writing in the 90s. 17. We close out the album with one of Buffett's favorite tropes from the era, writing about missing his childhood, discovering your heart/again and again. Jimmy Dreams is also a sweet memorial to him with just the right touch of steel drums. Like most American fans, I came to know Pulp through "Common People", their biggest hit off the Different Class album. By the time they popped up on the Trainspotting soundtrack, I was hanging out with British nannies who made sure I got a copy of the previous Pulp album, His & Hers. They told me the band had been around since the 80s New Wave movement. But that they kind of sucked for a while. I think it's less that they sucked, and more that they were directionless and forgettable. They had some decent songs but frontman Jarvis Cocker was still writing about love and life in his twenties, which isn't nearly as interesting as the sexual voyeurism and class envy that he focused on in the 90s and early 2000s. I bought their early hits anthology, Countdown, when it came out but...I didn't listen to it more than once. I have very different opinions about what early Pulp songs are worth a listen or two. Death Goes To The Disco is my personal compilation of their best singles, album cuts, and B-sides from the 80s and very early 90s. It's sort of Nick Cave meets The Cure but fails to write a mega-pop hit. 1. There's a Nick Cavey bop to the first track, Don't You Want Me Anymore? It's a love song about falling in love with someone at their worst and being desperate for them not to leave him but with a weird dash of how he wants his whole home town to watch and approve. It's a slight twist on a common songwriting trope and it helps elevate this out of typical love song territory. There's a bit of growl to Cocker's voice that he smoothes out over the years. It's a shame. I like the growl. Also, there's fiddley-violin on this track that gives it a brightness most New Wave tracks lack. This could absolutely be a melodramatic ballad in an 80s Coming Of Age film.
2. I Want You isn't just an answer to the previous track's title. It's also a familiarish piano twinkle riff New Waver. It's got some fun 50s style doo-wop background vocals in some places. The lyrics start out pretty forgettable and common with some super easy rhymes but evolve more malice to them than you'd expect. A lot of love songs sound stalkery and creepy if you really listen to them, but this is In Your Face Psycho Love with actual threatens of violence if the love is not returned, all with those doo-wop bum bum bum bums in the background. 3. We pep things up with some drum machine and bleepy pop at the beginning of Death II. There's some lovely twangy bass in the background while Cocker sings about dying at the disco, and yet waking up alive and in love the next morning. It's pretty delightful. This also marks the first time Jarvis Cocker points out that he isn't Jesus Christ. This will be a theme he revisits several times over the decades, including during his biggest pop culture moments where he hopped on stage while Michael Jackson was singing "Earth Song" and mocked Jackson's martyr image. I also noticed when I was putting this together how many Pulp songs end with the word away. This track makes it 2/3 for the album. 4. There is a LOT of violin on this album. The previous track ends with a violin riff, and this track begins with another one before a whole string section climbs into the song. I swear this could be a B-Side to "Fiddler On The Roof". And then, out of nowhere, it turns into an 8-bit country western song. Seperations is an unsung howler in Pulp's discography. It doesn't sound at all like a Tom Waits song but it has hie energy. If someone told me that this was the song that inspired The World/Inferno Friendship Society, I'd 100% believe them. And we're 3/4 for away. 5. There's No Emotion has the most Cure-y lyrics on this album. There is a beautiful harmony background vocal to this song which I wish appeared more often in the discography. I think this would be stronger about how emotionless he seems, as opposed to making it about someone else. But that's a 2023 view of 198something song. 4/5 for away. 6. There's a darker hook to the strumming guitar on There Was. It has an early REM feel to it. It's a cozy stalker song about how he knows what you're thinking. You love him. You love him. He totally knows that you love him. So why don't you love him? The lyrics are way more complex than I'm giving them credit for but the subtext screams while Cocker and his background vocalists give us an entire verse of la la la las. 7. I love me a song that starts with a tight drum groove. Life Must Be So Wonderful is an unexpected but not unwelcome side hug from an acquaintance. The two of you sway from side to side to the laid back song. Maybe holding a lighter aloft. Then everything falls away but the drum machine. When the music comes back you're no longer touching, and the swaying has shrunk down to just head bopping. Cocker teases us with the last line being a way but then adds another few lines and then BOOM away! 5/7. 8. Dogs Are Everywhere is a tropical breeze about the omnipresence of the kind of people who just suck to be around. Not literal dogs, which are awesome, but cads. How they're omnipresent, and that deep down we're all dogs. It's a sweet conceit. Instead of away, we end the song with the title. 9. We bring back the circus energy for Down By The River. Something about this song reminds me of Ween. Oh dear, someone dies again in this song. Maybe don't date Jarvis Cocker. He seems to leave a lot of angry women and corpses in his wake. I was really hoping this wong would end with the water washing the corpse away but it didn't happen. 10. Ambient conversation bridges the previous track to the spare piano of Blue Girls. The flute and reverb lift this weird little song into the ether. 11. I love the flute and background vocals on Wishful Thinking but the lyrics remind me of the poetry I wrote when I was nineteen and constantly in love with bad decisions. It's not very creative, just one of those self-pitying love me love me love me why don't you know how much I love you love me love me love me songs. But the melody is haunting, so I'm keeping it on the album. 12. Uh-oh, another song about a woman Jarvis is in love with that has death or dead in the title! There were definitely some decaying "Blue Girls" in that track, too. She's Dead is less metaphorical about it, though. I mean She's dying is the opening lyric. It's got a New Wave western movie from the 80s feel. I don't know what video game this could be the theme to but I know you'd be playing it on the original Nintendo. It's also one of them there songs about how you wish you would have/could have died with the object of your love so that you wouldn't be separated. 13. Here's the title track! Another drum machine start with Nintendo theme vibes. But you can really dance to this one as Death Goes To The Disco. One of the more upbeat songs warning about the perils of overdosing on drugs. 14. We wrap things up with the lush lullaby Manon about, what else, a guy sitting in his house, and later his garden, picking the flesh off the corpse of his deceased girlfriend. You know...you know...I thought the voyeuristic lyrics from Pulp's 90s output was creepy but DAMN Jarvis, how many dead women are on this album? (Sadly, we end this album with a paltry 5/14 songs ending with the preposition away.) There is something macabre about writing up reimagined discographies of older artists, and hanging on to them until they pass, even though it would make posting about them immediate and topical, and therefore seemingly more relevant to people. It's not my style. I didn't want to wait to post this Tina Turner discography, though. She's an artist who I enjoyed immensely since I first heard "What's Love Got To Do With It" in some neighbor's car when I was in first or second grade. My parents only listened to oldies, so while I was familiar with Tina Turner from "Proud Mary" and "I Want To Take You Higher", I had no idea she was still putting out music. (My musical education at seven was shamefully shallow.) But ever since hearing that track, I've been a fan. I had cousins who owned the Private Dancer tape, and my parents had no problem with me listening to modern music, it just wasn't their thing, so they bought me Break Every Rule, which I failed to properly appreciate. In fact, I mostly forgot about Tina unless she was on the radio until I joined the Columbia House and BMG scams of the 90s, and first got her Simply The Best, and then all of her solo CDs. I saw What's Love Got To Do With It during its first week in theaters, and I came out of the movie remembering that I had once made a cassete mix of my favorite Turner tracks, and decided I needed to update it. This first album is nothing like those mixes. I really only knew a few songs from of her work with Ike when I was a kid. I knew Tina from the radio, and considered plunging into her eighties and nineties work, and sticking "Proud Mary" somewhere a sufficient knowledge of her music. I was, obviously, an idiot. I think I reinvested in listening to Tina in 2007ish. I was on the dumb side of a bad breakup, and had made a joke about listening exclusively to Tina Turner songs, and then thought "I mean, I should totally do that. Not to be sad or triumphant but because Tina Turner's music is amazing." So I delved into the sixties material, and discovered that one of my favorite 90s Tina Turner songs was just a rerecording of a 1970s hit. Like previous Reimagined Discoveries, this is not a guide to The Historically Most Important And Highly Rated Songs Of Tina's Career, this is just a collection of songs I like that I've put together for an album feel. 1. We start off with drums, partially because it's a solid beat, partially because I don't want Ike to be the first thing we hear in a Tina Turner discography, important as he was to her early career. Soon the riff pops in, and then Tina's vocal for Honky Tonk Woman comes in fairly gently before we near the chorus. I'm not much of a Rolling Stones fan, so it shouldn't be too surprising that I prefer this cover to the original. She and Ike have released a ton of live versions of this song, but the studio cut from Come Together is my favorite version.
2. Sorry to open with two covers but Tina just owned any song she touched, and in the Ike & Tina days, the songs by Not Ike were mostly better than the songs by Ike. Stagger Lee And Billy was a song I was familiar with because my parents listened to the original Lloy Price, which is also a banger. 3. Early Tina Turner's style was often described as "nice and rough" for her effortless journey from a sweet, soulful beginning of a song to a scorching chorus. She made it easy for people to tag her with this style when she mentions it at the beginning of her iconic cover of Proud Mary, easily the most famous song from the Ike & Tina days. This is another song that's "nearly as" to "more" iconic than the original version (by Creedence Clearwater Revival). 4. I love Sly & The Family Stone. I should probably do a Reimagined Discography of them soon, too. I can't tell you what the first song I heard from them was, but I'm pretty sure I heard Tina's cover of River Deep Mountain High first. The Ikettes just absolutely nail the background vocals on this song. And Tina tinas her way into the stratosphere. 5. We stretch way ahead for the next track. Tina croons her face off to the piano torch song version of A Woman In A Man's World. This was from her first post-Ike album, and it's a gorgeous lament. I didn't want a chronological tale of love narrative to this album because Tina was so much more than her relationship with Ike, so I decided to include this as an intro to, as opposed to a climax to the next track. 6. A Fool In Love is one of the few early songs that starts with acapella Tina before the Ikettes and the band join in. It's from Ike & Tina's first album which is a horror of a realization when you examine their relationship. Like, this was the first time most people heard Tina. You kind of want to reach across time and say "Trust your gut, Anna Mae. He's not a good man. Don't wait almost twenty years to get out!" Musically, you can still feel the 50s all over this early 60s track. It was clearly in their arsenal for a while before their record deal. 7. Let's put the focus back on Tina with one of her own songs, Nutbush City Limits is the song I mentioned hearing the 90s version of before the 70s version. They're both wonderful. But the funk guitar intro on this before the vocals kick in just make you want to dance jaggedly. It's nowhere near as full voiced or catchy as her own reimagining but it's a perfect raw pop rock song. Also, great use of a Moog synthesizer by Ike to make this sound absolutely nothing like any other Tina Turner song. 8. If You Can Hully Gully is another song Tina co-wrote. A nostalgic song about a 1950s dance where no one was allowed to touch. Probably popular at church socials and other places people should run from. 9. Keeping the fun dancing alive, we move to The Night Time Is The Right Time. On par with Ray Charles's original scorcher, it's a song I could listen to on repeat as Tina screeches "Squeeze me!" and the Ikettes monotone "night and day" in the background. The breakdown guitar solo is also just good, solid, mid-century rock and roll. 10. And if the night time really is the right time then why not Let's Spend The Night Together? It's another Rolling Stones song where prefer the cover to the original. And it's all because of Tina. The arrangement is fine but it's not the star. The Stones' arrangement is better. But Tina's vocals leave Jagger in the dust. And that's not a knock on Jagger. His vocals on the original are fantastic. I just think Jagger sounds like he wants to spend the night together while Tina NEEDS to. 11. The Temptations' Ball Of Confusion is one of my favorite songs of all-time. The arrangement, the lyrics, the message. Perfection. This is one of the few times where I think the original far surpasses Turner's cover but that doesn't mean I don't also want to listen to her sing it. Her version just needs more background vocals than it has, preferably something slightly different than the style in the original. 12. We close out this album with a piano ballad. Another torch song. Sometimes When We Touch is just lush and gorgeous and all the other easy cliches to describe a song that's just emotionally heavy but beautiful to listen to. I always thought this version of the song belonged in the Little Shoppe Of Horrors musical. The U2 Reimagined Discography, 13: Surrendered + A Review Of The Original Album Songs Of Surrender3/17/2023 The tracks U2 released ahead of Songs Of Surrender had me absolutely dreading this release. Bono has tweaked lyrics and none of the tweaked lyrics are an improvement. Most of the songs appeared to just be slowtempo versions of classic bangers with all the life strangled out of them. I gave the forty-track album a full listen through, and then looked online to see what songs the band had selected for the sixteen and twenty track releases, and realized that my goal from putting together this reimagined album was much different from their idea of what their best material was. For me, I chose the songs that were different from any previous versions. Ones that were rearranged for Bono's current range, and didn't pervert the original lyrics too much. Songs that I could see myself listening to on their own merit, not just because they were familiar songs. Still, it's best not to listen to this as a studio album, but as a live soundboard recording where they've managed to completely erase the sound of the audience. Maybe a Zoom concert? Something more akin to the Remixes For Propaganda bootlegs than something that needed a mainstream release. The songs range all the way from Boy to Songs Of Experience. There are a few albums not represented, as there weren't any songs from October or No Line On The Horizon on the forty track album. On the flip side, there were plenty of songs from Achtung Baby and Songs Of Innocence, they just all sucked. Below is the track listing for the fourteen tracks out of forty that I enjoyed. Below that is a review of each of the forty songs from the Deluxe Release that came out today. I would neither waste my money on the forty track version, nor would I bother either of the sixteen or twenty track versions, as I believe the band completely whiffed on this concept. They should have been trying to please fans by putting out alternate takes to less well-known tracks, which may have also drawn in new fans, or won over some of the many justified U2 haters. Instead, they decided to release an album that could be called What If Our Greatest Hits Sucked? 1. Red Hill Mining Town (from The Joshua Tree) 2. Miracle Drug (from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb) 3. Dirty Day (from Zooropa) 4. Stories For Boys (from Boy, featuring The Edge on vocals) 5. Two Hearts Beat As One (from War) 6. Lights Of Home (from Songs Of Experience) 7. If God Would Send His Angels (from Pop) 8. 11 O'Clock Tick Tick (unreleased track) 9. The Little Things That Give You Away ( 10. Sunday Bloody Sunday 11. Out Of Control 12. Bad 13. Peace On Earth 14. All I Want Is You My review of the forty track Songs Of Surrender, after listening through it a couple of times: 1. One While I vastly prefer almost every other version of this song I've heard, be it a live version, the Mary J Blige collaboration, the original, Damien Rice's mournful crooning cover, Johnny Cash's raspy interpretation, Melissa Etheridge's one woman loop band cover during the pandemic, the music in this version isn't really the problem. Yes, Edge's background vocals of love is a temple, love is a higher law are a hokey distraction near the end of the song. The real problem, though, is Bono's vocals. People age. When they age, their range changes. I remember a friend went and saw U2 twenty years ago, and even then he mentioned that they had to do a medley of some of The Unforgettable Fire songs because Bono couldn't hit those notes anymore. That's going to happen to singers. So you change keys, you write new music or find appropriate covers that fit your range. But why would you rerecord one of your best songs with noticeably poorer vocals. Cracks in the foundation of your larynx. Warbling around the key, like you're not sure what fits the melody's lock. This is a dooming intro to an album of reimagined hits. It's at least a better version than the one REM and U2 did for MTV in 1993. 2. Where The Streets Have No Name The original version of this song has such an iconic opening, that, honestly you have to swing for the fences when you reinterperet it. I think Edge did a solid job of arranging this song to fit the vibe of New Age Soft Rock For Boomers. It's not an improvement over the original by any stretch, but it's a solid alternative. Bono's vocals even work for this track. Unfortunately, Bono has decided to rewrite the lyrics to this song so it's specifically about a desert, like he really really wants you to know it's about a desert so he says desert repeatedly. And he's even changed other lyrics for no valid reason. And while Bono in 2023 isn't quite the singer he was in 1987, he's a much worse songwriter. If these were the lyrics to the song in 1987, even if it was matched up with the tempo and arrangement of the original track, this would not be anyone's favorite U2 song. Not even The Joshua Tree National Park Desert Preservation Society. I will say that Bono's croony oooooooos near the end were a wise choice, given his current vocal limitations. 3. Stories For Boys The Edge is the spotlight on this arrangement of one of U2's earliest tracks. He provides vocals, and plays piano. This is the first track that I actually like on this album. Is it better than the original? Maybe. It's certainly a valid reinterpretation. It's definitely an Old Man Looks Back On His Youth song, as opposed to the I Just Graduated From High School And I'm All Grown Up/Too Early For Nostalgia song that was the original. It works really well. 4. 11 O'Clock Tick Tock Another interesting alternative to the original/live tracks I've heard. The updated lyrics don't bother me much. I thought I was annoyed that he changed the ethereal bridge lyrics to sad song, sad song but it turns out those are the original lyrics, they were just so mumbly in the original, I didn't realize they were actual words. I will go on the record as saying this version, with Edge's Latin American inspired guitar near the end, is actually a vast improvement over the original. 5. Out Of Control When I wrote the reimagined version of Boy and October (my version os Boytober), I mentioned that the lyrics to this song about turning eighteen were some of U2's worst. The arrangement wasn't much better. But, again, it was very early U2. They were still teenagers. This version is the second song in a row that I would say is an actual improvement over the original. It sounds like a B-Side from How To Assemble An Atomic Bomb. If that sounds like feint praise, it is. I like this updated version more than the original, but it's never been one of their best songs. And Bono using his aged Picard whispy voice to sing about how he's out of control is just silly and doesn't really work. 6. Beautiful Day Did we need this piano-forward reinterpretation of the lead single from All That You Can't Leave Behind? Sigh. Yes. While I prefer the original, I'm not sure if that would be true if I heard this version first. I think it's a case of enjoying what I'm already used to. That said, there is an unnecessary lyrical change in the second verse where Bono seems to be updating, not "Beautiful Day" but the Passenger's Soundtrack cut "Your Blue Room", which is an interesting choice. But not a better choice. The original lyrics were better. Still, this isn't as bad or unnecessary as I feared. 7. Bad If this were a live album by latter-day U2, this would be the breakout hit. It's set in Bono's current range. It's pretty much just an acoustic version of the original except. Except. Except the lyrics are updated. And, again, Bono is not a better songwriter in 2023 than he was in 1984. But, even though this one of my favorite early U2 tracks, I don't Hate the changes. They're just okay. Against all my expectations, this is a perfectly fine alternative version to the original. I would voluntarily listen to this. It's still a banger. 8. Every Breaking Wave When I did my reimagined version of Songs Of Innocence and Songs Of Experience, this song didn't make the cut. This one won't make the cut, either. Like the previous track, it just feels like an acoustic, live version of the original. In this case, it's Bono singing while Edge plays piano, and there are no other instruments. But they've made it sound like it was recorded in a space with vaulted ceilings so we get a nice echoey vibe for both the vocals and the piano. It would be a fine closer to a later-day U2 album. It's just never going to be my favorite track. 9. Walk On Nope. This was never U2's strongest song. It got extra attention paid to it because it was an uplifting song that was released during 2001, and was therefore wrongly co-opted as a response to 9-11. Woof. Now, however, Bono has rewritten it. Not because of the 9-11 issue, but because the original was banned in Burma, as it was about an ousted democratic leader there. The new version is about The Ukraine, and the lyrics are terrible. This is a real Elton John rerecords "Candle In The Wind" moment. Only worse because the original wasn't very good to begin with. Changing home/that's where the heart is to home/that's where the hurt is is a strong contender for valid reasons to use the barf emoji. 10. Pride (In The Name Of Love) This was the first song I heard from the new album, and one of the reasons I was convinced this whole project was going to be terrible. If you drain all the passion and power out of the original version of this song, the tepid elevator music version of this song would be better than this soulless, poorly produced lullaby. They should have either left this song alone, or come up with a better idea for rerecording it. 11. Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses I've heard that U2 actually hates the original version of this song from Achtung Baby. I've always quite liked it. Both the original, and the Temple Bar Remix from the single's B-Side. This updated recording is unnecessary but inoffensive. It's barely discernable from the Temple Bar Remix, apart from worse background vocals and the feeling that most of this album has, that it's just a watered down, live acoustic version from an aging band. 12. Get Out Of Your Own Way Another song from either Songs Of Experience or Songs Of Innocence that I didn't think was good enough to make my reimagined album, Sometimes. And, again, this version wouldn't make an album, either. While it is nice to hear drums for what feels like the first time on this album, the lyrics are not just badly written, they're flatly delivered. If Bono doesn't care about this song, why should I? Get out of your own way, Bono, and let this song be forgotten. 13. Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of Another All That You Can't Leave Behind song that got wrapped up in the post 9-11 fervor. This was on heavy repeat on MTV during the weeks after the tragedy. I like it more than "Walk On". And this version, like "Bad", falls into the Perfectly Acceptable Acoustic Live Version category. The bongos might be a bit much, but *shrug emoji*. 14. Red Hill Mining Town The original version of this song had a really unique sound that worked with The Joshua Tree, and yet felt jarring, with Edge's guitar squeak. This version serves as a tribute to that, as it's much meatier than an other song on this album. It's more marching band than acoustic show. I like it. Bono's voice even sounds stronger here than on the earlier tracks. 15. Ordinary Love When the original track, dedicated to Nelson Mandela came out, and Google had it categorized as Reggae I laughed someone else's ass off (I need mine, and am protective of it). It's never been reggae. This has never been an interesting song, either, and I actually fell asleep listening to it this morning. I legitimately dreamed I was texting someone about how boring this song was, and woke up and started searching for the text. 16. Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own This was my surprise favorite song from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. Sure, I like "Vertigo" and "City Of Blinding Lights" just fine, but there was a real raw honesty to the original version of this song that's often absent from twenty-first century U2. This piano ballad version just sucks all of the intensity out of the original, and leaves a treacly melodramatic breathathon in its place. The new version of Can you hear me when I sing / You're the reason I sing / You're the reason why the opera is in me makes me viscerally angry. It's such an affront to the original take. It's between this and "One" for What's My Least Favorite Song On This Album. 17. Invisible Like "An Ordinary Love", I didn't immediately recognize what song this was, as I just never really listened to the original very often. It's like the song was so focused on the theme of "Invisible" that I can't even remember it unless I'm actually listening to it. 18. Dirty Day This Zooropa song was a low-key bop on the original album, but when U2 released the Junk Day mix on the B-Side of "Please", I fell instantly in love. This version seems truer to the Junk Day Mix than the original, with bass accompimamet, then adds in percussion and strings. It's Very Sleep Inducing but, unlike, "Ordinary Love", it's not bad. It's just deliberately slow. 19. The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) ZzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzzz. Huh? I woke up and this song was on. Another song from Songs Of Innocence or Songs Of Experience that I didn't like originally when I was combining them into Sometimes. I dont t'hink this version is an improvement, but I'm not inspired to go back and check out the original, either. 20. City Of Blinding Lights Another unnecessary track. This is just a pared-down version of the How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb track but with weaker vocals. It would be an acceptable track for a live, acoustic show, but it's nothing special and certainly several steps down from the original cut. 21. Vertigo The intro to this song hints at a wildly different version of the song before the guitar kicks in, and it's just another stripped down song with Bono toning down the power behind his vocals. There are verious interesting instrumentals popped in to the sections without vocals, but then the band seems to agree that Bono's vocals couldn't shine through them. 22. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For There are already two popular and well-loved versions of this song. The original The Joshua Tree version, and the incredible, gospel choir backed version from Rattle & Hum. If there is a third, defining version of this song, it's not the one on this album, which boasts a mediocre, low-pitched karaoke level performance with hints of the classic instrumentation buried under soft rock production. 23. Electrical Storm Similarly, there are already two versions of this song floating around, neither of them as well-loved as the previous track. One of the two new songs on Best Of 1990-2000, there's a lush ballad feel to the William Orbital mix. The producer of Madonna's Ray Of Light making a B-side level song into an interesting bop. The regular version just felt boring, and poorly arranged in comparison. This feels like a slight, and only slight, reworking of that inferior version. It takes longer than either previous version to amp up the emotion. It gets slightly interesting just as it begins to fade out, again when Bono doesn't have any lyrics. 24. The Fly There's a "Lounge Mix" version of this Achtung Baby track on the single. Yea, "The Fly" was the lead single for Achtung Baby. While I love the song, it's hardly the best song on the album. I like combining the original and the "Lounge Mix" into a sonically interesting mix. This new version had me for a bit at the beginning, but once Edge's background vocals kick in, it's downhill for a bit. It picks back up near the end, making this track ok but not a viable alternative to the previous versions. 25. If God Would Send His Angels One of my favorite tracks off of Pop, boasts a fun, over-produced stomping "Big Yam Mix" as a B-side alternate take of the song. That's the version I put on my reimagined album, Popmart, as the real problem with U2's Pop is that it only sort of embraced dance music. The B-side mixes went All In, and in most cases, are the superior versions. This new version is, quel surprise, a stripped down piano ballad. It works better for this track than most of the others on this album. Even Bono's weaksauce falsetto about halfway through work in this song's favor. I don't think this is nearly as strong as The Big Yam Mix, but it might be better than the original version from Pop. Pushing the Where do we go lyric even deeper into the mix than it is in either previous version makes sense. And while I don't love The Edge's background arrangement on this version, they're hardly terrible. 26. Desire Bono is not, and never will be, Prince. He certainly loves what he sometimes calls his falsetto soul voice. It's on full force on this reimagining of "Desire", and it's a terrible choice. This is a screamer of a song, not a cartoon internet meme from the late 90s. The vocals are incredibly incongruous with the heavy instrumentation. It just doesn't work. I applaud the big swing they took here, but they should have listened to the track and redone the vocals with Bono's gravelly old man voice. 27. Until The End Of The World I used to love this Achtung Baby cut, but then I heard Patti Smith'e version on Ahk-Toong-Bay-Bi and it was such a better, more powerful version that I found the original rather silly. And this new version is pretty much just the acoustic version of the original, which wasn't heavily electronic. And, again, Bono does a verse in his falsetto, which is difficult to parse and not particularly fun to listen to. 28. Song For Someone No, thank you. There are two versions of this song between Songs Of Experience and Songs Of Innocence. One is called "Song For Someone", the other is called "There Is A Light". Neither are bad songs but the world didn't need both. My reimagined album, Sometimes has pieces of these songs as a medley about lightness and darkness, which permeates Experience and Innocence. It's overly long, and threatened to put me back to sleep. 29. All I Want Is You A seemingly music-box-inspired of this Rattle & Hum classic is another sucessful lullibyification. It almost begs for sing-along vocals (though I'm glad The Edge doesn't provide them). The sweeping build halfway through is undercut a little by Bono's completely unnecessary Yea! Yea! Yea!s but the song quickly recovers. 30. Peace On Earth I'm not much of a fan of the original, which appears on All That You Can't Leave Behind. This version, which seems to be just The Edge, singing and playing guitar like some sort of hippie summer camp counselor, before some synths flow in like haunted background vocals, is a vast improvement and sounds like nothing else on this album, which is a good thing. 31. With Or Without You Another hard pass for me. Bono tweaks the lyrics to one of his best written songs for no valuable reason. Otherwise, this is just a flat rerecording of the original with weaker vocals that warble around the key, and spare instrumentation. 32. Stay (Far Away, So Close!) I made a face more appropriate for having eaten a "Lemon" when this song began. This is far and away the best song from Zooropa. The vocals were pitch perfect. Here, they're just low and forgettable until they're supposed to soar. In the original, Bono goes right up to the edge of his falsetto for a bit before finally breaking into it, and it's pure rock bombast. Here, he gently nudges his falsetto, and he just sounds tired, which doesn't work with the lyrics. 33. Sunday Bloody Sunday On one of the Pop B-sides, The Edge takes over vocal duties for a slowed-down version of "Sunday, Bloody Sunday", and it's such a stark contrast to the original that it's haunting and really feels like the band doing something new. They reproduce that here, twenty-five years later, but with Bono on vocals. It's fine, I guess. Why Bono decided wipe your tears away needed to be changed to wipe your tears from your eyes baffles me. Did he think the U2 fans willing to buy this album wouldn't know where tears come from? He then pushes into a new final verse. I would like to reiterate that Bono hasn't become a better songwriter recently, and should maybe let his songs stand as they are. 34. Lights Of Home Without going back and listening to the original Songs Of Experience track, I couldn't tell you what the difference between that version and this one is. I can only tell you that I think I like this one better. 35. Cedarwood Road I almost just typed "ibid" but the original version for this song came from Songs Of Innocence. The only difference is that, while I like this version better, I still don't like it enough that I have any desire to listen to it again. It just doesn't inspire me in any way, nor does it have a memorable hook. 36. I Will Follow The further away U2 is from the original material, the more interesting their reimaginings are. The new lyrics don't grab me, but I like the production here. 37. Two Hearts Beat As One It's Disco U2! I thought they disappeared after Pop, but here, on this track from War, they go full 1970s dance pop. It's a damned delight. How was this song left off the standard issues of Songs Of Surrender while absolute slogs like "One" and "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" remained? 38. Miracle Drug There are songs on How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb that I enjoy but don't often listen to because I rarely have the urge to listen to that era of U2. This is definitely one of them, and it does sound better with its drum-forward opening. I'm not sure if I'll listen to the reimagined Surrendered any more than I do to the reimagined No Line On The Horizon, which is where this track landed in my discography. But I do enjoy being exposed to this alternate take. 39. The Little Things That Give You Away I included a heavily edited version of this song as part of the long light/dark medley on my reimagined Sometimes. I just think it's a one verse song until the end, where the song flips to the "Sometimes" portion, which I love. I think the second verse of this track is still unnecessary. But this is a beautiful version of the song. I appreciate that Bono enunciates the closing of the song better in this version. 40. 40
The live version of this song on Under A Blood Red Sky, where the audience sings the band off the stage will always be the best version of this song. This version is an improvement over the original track on War. It makes sense as the closing song of this experiment but on an album that's pretty much forty ballads, it doesn't really stand out. Making the first album for Cyndi's discography was simple. While Madonna may have had more hits, and seemed to be a more consistent 80s and 90s pop star, Cyndi Lauper was a unique 80 pop visionary who could sell songs about sex without making that her entire personality for five years. She didn't need to constantly update her image to appeal to the MTV generation, nor did she feel the need to push taboo envelopes to garner shock value. There's nothing wrong with any of those things Madonna did them perfectly in order to keep a stranglehold on the pop diva crown, but Lauper was just herself for her entire career, and while she fell out of the spotlight for the 90s and early 21st century, she never seemed desperate to reclaim it. She's not desperate in this era, either. She's doing her own thing, even if it seems to be somewhat unusual compared to her 80s output. I mean, unusual is what Cyndi does. It's the name of her breakthrough album. I've tried to spread around the two main concepts that make up this album. 1.) There are still some very 80s tracks worthy of being in her discography, even if they weren't the powerhouse hits from She's So Unusual. 2.) She put out a country album called Detour. Is it great country music? I don't know. I have a very specific type of country that I'm willing to listen to, and some of these songs fall into that category. I think they're worth your time. 1. We're going to start off country. Very much pre-1980s country. The classic, slow Patsy Cline style country. It's shocking how well Lauper's voice falls into that groove. Begging To You is just that sweet, generically lyriced love song with some soft fiddle riffs, that sound really 60s or 70s country to me.
2. Moving into the more modern, somewhat mean-spirited country, Vince Gill joins Cyndi for a duet that wouldn't seem out of place in the 1980s Muppet Show. You're The Reasons Our Kids Are Ugly is one of those we love each other, even though our relationship is complicated songs that seem like Jim Henson or Shel Silverstein could have written them, as opposed to Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. Lauper's delivery is more subdued here than in the first track, but it kind of has to be to keep from stealing the spotlight from Vince's limited range. 3. Back to mid-century we go, Lauper lets us know I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart. This is more Dolly Parton than Patsy Cline. This is another song that seems like it would be at home on a kids show from sometime before the 80s. It's got a nice little guitar solo broken up by Cyndi using her So Unusual voice to say "Yippee-yi-yay" in the background. Oh, and Jewel yodels on this track. Why not? 4. Ok, let's take a break from the country and go back to Lauper's signature 80s pop ballad style. Who Let In The Rain has the haunting synth organ and minimal percussion leading you into the chorus, where the bass arrives, welcomes the drums, and we start to get a subdued New Wave classic. Something Ric Ocasek might have penned for The Cars. But it ends with a very Tina Turnerish belted fade out. 5. We get a little 90s pop dancy with Sisters Of Avalon, the closes Lauper ever gets to recording an Alanis Morissette song. Her voice waivers in a way I don't remember her using anywhere else in the discography. 6. What's 80ser than The Goonies? Cyndi Lauper singing the theme song, The Goonies R Good Enough? Yea. I don't remember this song at all. But it's so Cyndi. This probably belongs on She's So Unusual but I didn't remember it, and it makes for a fun retro song on this collection. 7. We're back to the country for the title track. Detour is another fiddley country song. This seems really Johnny Cash to me. It's very speak-country with that twinge of harmony to it, and then a wonderfully simple, yet beautiful harmony during the chorus. Man, I would love to hear Cyndi cover an entire Johnny Cash album. That's going on my musical bucket list. 8. Night Life falls into that chasm between country and Jimmy Buffet tropical soft rock. Slow piano, crooning, soft fiddles, Willie Nelson. All you need for a cool night on a Florida porch, sipping something whiskeyed or, I don't know, vanilla-esque. Something slightly off and delicious in its inappropriateness. It's a very sedated duet. 9. We get the danciness back for Unhook The Stars, which would esaily be the B-side to "Sisters Of Avalon". There's a very country bassline, but everything else is late 80s/early 90s Lillith Fair pop. 10. Heartaches By The Numbers is very much a prototypical country song but with Lauper returning to her Patsy Cline voice. It's gorgeous and, so far, the toe tappingest of her country songs. 11. The best title on the album, unquestionably, is Funnel Of Love. Is it country? Is it 90s "alternative" rock? Is it neitherly both? Is it a 50s throwback? There's a lot going on in this simple sounding song. 12. Time for a Lauper classic. I Drove All Night is actually a Roy Orbison song, but Lauper released it first, as a single, and it's perfect. Another very new-wave Cars-y track that's also, somehow, uniquely Cyndi Lauper. 13. We close off the album with a bookend. We began with Lauper channeling Patsy Cline's style, so we end on a classic Patsy Cline cover. I have always loved the original I Fall To Pieces, and Lauper elevates it without altering it very much. It's just such a beautiful, simple sounding love song. It's a great closer. There are two things at fault for me posting a Jimmy Buffet discography. 1.) Famed poet, and generally good human, Sam Mercer posted a confession that they'd reached the point in life where they found themselves enjoying Jimmy Buffet. 2.) Two days before my body imploded in 2019, and I had to refigure my way back into my life, my mother, her husband, and I went out for a day of minigolf and dinner just outside of Universal Studios. Dinner was at Margaritaville. Despite the fact that I hadn't been cognizant of hearing a Jimmy Buffet song since 1995 (I'm sure I heard snippets here and there in groceries store and from passing cars), I knew every lyric of every song that played while we ate. And they were all, of course, Jimmy Buffet songs. I will forever know all of them, even when riddled with dementia and confused about my husband's name. This, I think will be a two disc journey. Possibly, a third? There are songs past Jimmy's greatest hits that I'm familiar with, and enjoy, but there are now 28 years of his music that I haven't yet been exposed to, and I, therefore, can't tell you whether or not I enjoy it. Time will tell. But here is the album of songs that I can never forget. Whether I can blame the jukebox where I went to high school, the coworker who played Songs You Know By Heart non-stop in the summer of 1993, the coworker that convinced me to go to a Jimmy Buffet concert in 1994, or my grandfather who used to play the eight tracks of some of Buffet's 70s albums when we were on his boat (natch). 1. What, did you think I was going to start out with "Margaritaville"? Nah. We'll get there. This is the ridiculous song where Jimmy Buffet plays guitars and sings like he always sings, but when he gets to the chorus, people put their hands together over their heads to resemble shark Fins and move them to the left and the right, as if it was a dance. Look, most old white people can't clap on rhythm, and this is at close as most of them get to dancing. Let them have this.
2. I think this is the only cover on the album but Brown Eyed Girl is one of those few songs that is definitively associated with both the original artist, Van Morrison, and a particular artist, in this case Buffet, who didn't slow the tempo down or speed it up, didn't change any of the lyrics, just included some steel drums at the beginning and end, and that somehow also made it his song. I don't know how these things happen, how is "Smooth Criminal" so closely associated with both Michael Jackson and Sum 41? 3. Our first ballad on the album comes in on a slow harmonica. A Pirate Looks At Forty is a beautiful boat ballad. I don't have any snark for this. Like most of his famous slow songs, it borders on country while still having his distinctive tropic Florida flair. 4. Drunk people screaming is a good way to power out of the last track and into the very silly The Weather Here, I Wish You Were Beautiful. Right near the beginning of the song, Buffet pronounces mosquitoes in the most puzzlingly obvious ways I've ever heard. Like they're parasitical charcoal from Texas. If you asked me what this song is about at any point in my life, I wouldn't be able to tell you, but if you start playing it, I'll be able to sing along with every word. Somehow. 5. He might not be able to pronounce mosquitoes but at least he sings Manana properly. He's probably helped more white boomers learn how to properly say this word than Duolingo. This is a sweet take on the Don't Leave Me song that every balladeer rocker or country artist wrote in the 70s and 80s. At one point, he tells the band to make the song Reggae, and they are about as successful as Sting or UB40 on that front. 6. If you're ever at one of Buffet's Margaritaville restaurants, and you hear the opening strums of Volcano, be prepared for the sirens to go off, for the drunk Parrotheads to start chanting like they're at a WWE live show, and for "lava" to pour out of the faux volcano, and into the Vat of Margarita that lives behind the bar. I'm sure the rumors that the lava come from a pipe in the bathroom are just hyperbole. The song, itself, is pretty catchy, in that 70s AM sigalong way that Buffet is such a master of. 7. Love And Luck is probably the least known song on this album, if you're not a Parrothead. The beginning just reminds me so much of Toto's "Africa" that I couldn't help but love this song in high school. It veers pretty quickly into its own thing, but that familiarity, and the requisite 80s horn riff just call to me from 1984 and will not let me go. 8. When I was in high school and had to own every artist's complete discography on CD, as opposed to just having the Greatest Hits albums, even if those were the only songs I knew, Changes In Latitude, Changes In Attitudes, was the first Buffet album I bought. If we weren't all crazy, we would go insane was pretty much the slogan of the dorm I lived in. 9. The previous song just perfectly transitions into Cheeseburgers In Paradise, probably Buffet's second most well-known song. In a world where we didn't constantly reward songs about heartbreak and overcoming adversity, this ode to a very American food would probably have been a #1 hit. The breakdown is delightfully stupid. 10. Taking it down a notch, we get to Grapefruit, Juicy Fruit a ballad about chewing gum and daydreaming that sounds more tropical and breathy than it probably deserves. 11. I think I was in the midst of reading Tom Robbins's Skinny Legs and All for not the first time when I first heard When Salome Plays The Drums, which may be why I enjoy it so much. Or it's the background vocals, or the line about setting phasers to stun. 12. One Particular Harbor is very Eaglesy (Buffet did open for them near the end of their initial career). The Tahitian intro translates to Nature lives (life to nature)/Have pity for the Earth (Love the Earth). It sounds much more environmental than the navel-gazing about the meaning of time's passage English lyrics. 13. Every 80s singer songwriter has to have some love song with a very instantly dated chorus that places it solidly in the cocaine and Rubik's Cube era. Money Back Guarantee, with its, obviously, saxaphone riffs, and a reference to Ginsu knives. is Buffet's. 14. I didn't know where to put Boat Drinks for the longest time. It's one of the few Buffet songs where I can always recognize the lyrics, but can't recognize whichsong it is from the intro music. It's a weird little ditty about cabin fever that features at least the second Star Trek reference on this album. 15. And that brings us to ...drum roll, please... Margaritaville. Now the name of his tiny empire of resorts in Florida, as well as the name of his restaurants. His most famous song. The most famous song about salt. The second most famous song about tequila. The first 1970s song I ever heard that seemed to be anti-misogynist without aggressively and almost falsely being anti-misogynist. It's a nice change of pace from songs about how women are always hurting male singers' feelings. 16. Pascagoula Run is a lesser-known Buffet track about being adventurous in world travel and love. And it gives time to women being adventurous and promiscuous, too, wthout casting any judgement. It's another outlier in 70s songwriting. 17. But, you know, let's flip that well-meaningness and get into the very silly, but pro-consent Why Don't We Get Drunk. I had a coworker who had three jobs working with children, who loved Jimmy Buffet, and would always play the Songs You Know By Heart even when the kids were around. But she always sang "...IN A LIGHTBULB" after the word screw. Because promoting alcoholism to children is fine. 18. Seeing death as just being Incommunicado is a fascinatingly immature way to way approach it. Buffet talks about his reaction to the death of John Wayne, while Buffet is on a road trip, and how real people rarely day with the bravado of characters in literature and cinema. 19. The Great Filling Station Holdup can be seen as part two of Incommunicado. Buffet is still driving, but he stops at a gas station and robs it because gas is expensive. FIFTY CENTS A GALLON. Ooof. Anyhow, Buffet realizes that the haul from the gas station wasn't really worth it. 20. In the previous song, Buffet lamented he wished he was somewhere other than here. Now he wishes he had a Pencil Thin Mustache. The song is about nostalgia for childhoold, a common Gen X and Millenial theme, but his references (from a song about nostalgia written in the 70s) are soon going to be a think only nerds specializing in early-mid-20th century America trivia know. It also includes one of the only ad jingles as song lyrics you'll hear in any artist discography that I post. 21. The honkey-tonk piano leading into the 80s bright horns and guitarr rifs at the beginning of Domino College are the big draw for me. I only go back to school in nightmares. Haunted background vocals or not. 22. Son Of A Son Of A Sailor is the beginning of the cooldown to the end of the album, not that I'd call any of the songs on this album anything more than humid. It's on theme with "A Pirate Looks At Forty" as a song of self-reflection with a focus on traveling to exotic (read: non-American) places. 23. The long distant love song is a 70s/80s classic. Guaranteed to involve a pay phone reference. If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me is Buffet's take on how he can't call the one he loves and misses because he's on a boat in the ocean. Like that's his entire persona. He can't call you. Cell phones had barely been invented, and certainly didn't get any bars in the middle of the ocean. 24. Now it's time for Buffet to miss a lover who is away from him. He's not away from her. She has gone away for an entire four days, and he has a big sad about in Come Monday (no, not like that). 25. Closing out the album is Buffet's controversial bisexual anthem about how the man that he also loved has also taken some time away. He Went To Paris is a tearful reminder about how in the 70s, what happened at sea, stayed at sea. Not really. Can you imagine? It's actually about the life of a Spanish Civil War veteran who ends up living his life traveling by sea. Bob Dylan said it's one of his favorite Jimmy Buffet songs. I get that. It is a smooth way to close out this album of songs whose lyrics are embedded forever in my brain. I was getting some work done the other night, and was playing a variety of albums from my Guilty Pop list (which is all pop, only occasionally guilty). I threw on my Cyndi Lauper album and Comrade started singing along to the occasional song, or announcing "This is a bop. I thought Cyndi Lauper was mostly an actor." I, too, had a realization a decade or so ago that I kew way more Cyndi Lauper songs than I thought. Yea, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, yea True Colors, yea Time After Time. After that there were a few songs that if I thought about Cyndi long enough, I'd go "Oh, and..." All Through The Night, She Bop, Money Changes Everything. The rest of the songs on this album I wouldn't have been able to come up with if you asked me to name any Cyndi Lauper songs, but I know most to all of the words. I had imagined this would be a One Album Discography, as I only heard the occasional uninspired cover song by Lauper after, say, 1989. But that's the fault of either the radio or my friends with poor taste, as Lauper has some interesting country, standards, and blues covers, mostly because her voice is still so unusual, and so passionate. I'll get to that album when I'm more familiar with her later work. 1. Cascading down like synthesized rain, All Through The Night should have been the opening track of the original album. You could argue about opening it with "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" for the hit factor, but otherwise, this is the sensible opener to me. Sure, it's kind of a mid-tempo song, lacking the kick of some of the other tracks, but it's got a catchy chorus and it's simultaneously bright and haunting. It's the perfect weird track for this gorgeous, weird album. You also get a taste of Lauper's voice when it's not So Long Island.
2. In elementary/middle school, there were a trio of somwehat popular kids who had their own dialect of taunt. They used Italian words, and occasional song lyrics as they shook their heads at their targets. Iko Iko was one of their favorite taunts. I have no idea which version of the song they were familiar with but Lauper's was the first one I heard. 3. When my partner, Comrade, first heard She's So Unusual, he asked why I had a Betty Boop song on my playlist. It is a lovely, weird little song. I suppose this is another song you could argue would be an appropriately odd opener for the album. The old 1940s style intro launches into a sort of generic girl-group sounding rock song. I don't mean the song sounds generic. It sounds like the one off-beat song that Bananarama or The Go-Gos released, The track where you could tell they were actually having fun. 4. The Faraway Nearby is a song that I could have only heard when listening to Lauper's True Colors album. I don't ever remember it until it's playing. I've always loved the way she sings "out from the faraway", and I love the way the ending of the song seamlessly transitions to 5. True Colors. One of those rare songs that's not written by the vocalist but becomes the vocalist's song. The lyricist, Billy Steinberg, says that he wrote this song as a gospel piano ballad, passed it along to Lauper who decon and reconstructed it to fit her voice and style. It's one of the most resonant ballads of the 1980s in that you can definitely identify when it was produced and recorded but it still has a timeless emotional appeal. The world has never needed Phil Collins, Ana Kendrick, or Justin Timberlake to cover it. 6. I'm not sure which movie soundtrack I think Change Of Heart should have appeared on. It could be a rom-com, it could be an action movie, it could have been the shopping montage from Pretty Woman. It definitely belongs somewhere. It has such a great upbeat energy. I didn't know until this listenthrough that the backing vocalists are The Bangles, who you'll note, I didn't list as a generic girl group earlier. They're one of the most solid pop-rock groups of the 80s. The video for this was shot in England, and it includes a poster for Nightmare On Elm Street 2, an accidentally gay camp horror. This is so on brand for Lauper that it can't be an accident. 7. Lauper's interpretations of almost any song she voices becomes undeniably hers. It's rare that I listen to one of her songs and think "You could use this exact arrangement and replace her vocals with another famous singer, and it would work perfectly as is." Money Changes Everything, however, could have been a hit for any ambitious New Wave singer from Ric Ocasek to David Byrne to Annie Lennox to Debby Harry to any and all of the vocalists in the B-52s. 8. Do I need to say anything about Girls Just Want To Have Fun? This is the one song Everyone Knows is by Cyndi Lauper. It's one of the most iconic songs and videos from the 1980s. Lauper has had a long career crossing into a variety of genres. Her live shows can pull from anywhere in her extensive catalog, but I think any fan would feel robbed if she didn't sing this bop (as opposed to another upcoming bop) at some point during her performance. This is another of the rare songs I wish I heard the B-52s cover. 9. I earlier disparaged Phil Collins's cover of True Colors. Calm Before The Storm is the most Phil Collinsy song from Lauper's catalog. I'm not sure if it's the production on the drums or the way she holds on to the notes but I could definitely hear this coming off Hello, I Must Be Going. I mean this in the best possible way for both artists. 10. From Phil Collinsish to actually Billy Joel. Code Of Silence is one of the many unexpected duets on Joel's vastly underrated and weirdly unhappy The Bridge. If you really hate Billy Joel, give this album a listen. There are some pretty catchy songs that were never really hits, and he claims to have been absolutely miserable when recording it. 11. My father collected cassettes of old radio shows, which I used to listen to. This gave me some weird associations growing up. For example, I always think of The Shadow episode "Nursery Rhyme Killer" whenever I see Boy Blue, be it little or no. This is the song I least remember, apart from the On the street, kids walkin',/Just a kid walkin', just a kid walkin', just a kid/Where are you/Where are you/Where are you boy blue/Hey, where are you section near the end, which sound like they belong in a low budget Corey Feldman/Corey Haim movie...probably Dream A Little Dream, not that I'd change a single song from that movie. 12. Someone told me what the song She-Bop was about when I was way too young to have any idea what they meant. It was a just a quirky song with that bee-bop-ba-LOOP-she-boppart that everyone loved to sing along to. It wasn't until I heard that certain Divinyls song that I went, Ohhhhh, right, like She-Bop!The synths on this track are so 1984, it's sort of shocking that George Orwell didn't play them. 13. More synth magic sets the mood for When You Were Mine. I love the contrast between the alternating verses, one being a chill multi-track, the next being single track super Cyndi crooning. There's also some killer head voice that pops up here. 14. We close off the album with the classic ballad, Time After Time. This is one of those songs that gets covered frequently, but often by interesting vocalists, even though this is nearly the most mainstream Cyndi's voice ever sounds. Rob Hyman gets props for a basic-ass performance of the melody that make Lauper's harmonies soar. It's almost Simon and Garfunkely in its beautiful simplicity. I also love ending the album on fading whispers. For the last few years, when I've looked at Best Of album lists, or which albums have won grammys, I kept seeing the name Jacob Collier, and thinking, I should probably check him out. And by the time I did, I realized he was someone I was quasi-familiar with for his split screen Youtube covers. They're impressive from an arragement perspective. It clearly takes a lot of talent and time to do what he did, and he has a pleasing croony voice, but split screen covers aren't really a genre I enjoy. At some point, I saw him doing live sing-along covers where he did a different song every night of a tour, and, again, I thought it was an impressive concept, and he clearly has legions of devoted fans, but it's not the type of thing I seek out. So when his fourth consecutive album came out on the fourth consecutive Best Of The Year list, I did more research and kept seeing him listed as a songwriter. Not just an arranger. Ok. I bought each of his albums, and decided to give them all a proper listen to and see if any of it appealed to me. It's not necessarily music I'm going to play frequently. He does have a calming tone and a rich voice. He hovers around several music styles, usually with a jazz/chill bent. You can hear the acapella kid in every track, nor matter how many instruments there are. And while, again, it's not necessarily something I seek out to listen to, it does fill me with nostalgia for my own time in acapella groups and doing musical theater. Even if it's not something I'm currently invested in, there's no denying that Jacob Collier is one of the best at what he does, and that alone means I'm going to keep going back from time to time to see what he's up to. This reimagined album is mostly made up of the Djesse Sequence, which comprise his second, third, and fourth albums. 1. Percussion is almost as important to this album as close harmonies, so we start with a drum beat, some tinkling chimes, and then the scat harmonies. The first lead singer on the album is actually Lianne La Havas who has a bit of an early Alicia Keys vibe as she breathily leads Feel, occasionally blanketed by Collier's multiple harmonies, as well as her own multiplied voice. It is a gorgeous effect. It surrounds such a simplistic, generic, easily rhyming song about first love that has an almost tropically soothing melt.
2. Rising out of the repeated vocals of the previous track is a single flute, eventually joined by multiple woodwinds and then, of course, close harmonies. Calling a song called Sky Above ethereal is kind of a no brainer, but it is. This is a children's lullaby/folk song with additional harmonies from MARO and Becca Stevens. 3. In Too Deep comes in like a soft rain before the main vocals hit, at which point it gets as close to modern R&B as Collier seems likely to get. The instruments are pure soft jazz, as opposed to R&B but Kiana Ledé's vocals have an R&B tonality that plays perfctly against Collier's layered croon. The chorus mantra is hypnotic, especially the way it's buried in the mix. 4. We're back to intense percussion with Dun Dun Ba Ba. Fuck this song is infectious. This song is an example of Collier's genius at arrangement. The lead vocals have him sped up at an unrecognizable but not unbelievable tone. The Cuban drumming is efuckenlectric. 5. There is another rise of layered vocals to bring us into the only cover I included on the album, Moon River is a song I've heard from so many different artists that I don't associate it with anyone. I will now associate it with Jacob Collier. He goes through an entire verse of the song with just harmonized humming. It sounds like a mimd-twentieth century Disney cartoon arrangement. The second verse starts with chiming acapella percussion before the lyrics kick in. The final verse ascends from chromatic mantra to a seemingly infinitely layered choir. Like twenty Pentatonixes performing at once. It's nearly overwhelming. 6. From the absurd crescendo of the previous track, we drop into stringed instruments and a very Beatles with Beach Boy backing vocals vibe. It makes you realize just how much of a Brian Wilson influence is in much of Collier's work. Make Me Cry is a soft rock pop future classic. 7. The title track to this imagined album, and the four album sequence it pulls from, Djesse is a self reflection and a romantic myth wrapped in one musical theater opener. Metropole Orkest is a perfect accompaniment here. 8. With The Love In My Heart is more madness with The Metropole Orkest. It's tough to categorize this. It blends so many genres that it falls into the worrying category of "World" which is one of those genres that eans nothing to me, as it could be anything from anywhere. It's usually the musical equivalent of colonialism and appropriation. But that's not the case here. This is a blending of so many influences that it becomes a new thing. It's almost Beckish in the best possible way. It then deflates into nautical bells and another chant mantra chorus. 9. Ty Dolla $ign and Mala join in the fun in the 1970s groovefest, All I Need. I love this track but don't have a lot to say about it. 10. Daniel Caesar and some cool effects are the highlight of Time Alone With You. We have more sped up vocals slipping around Caesar's chill delivery. It's almost Prince's Camille but with better technology. 11. Do You Feel Love hits Much Heavier than any other track on this album. But it goes from its explosive beginning to a Michael Jacksonesque pop track. You know, heavy guitar riffs by a legend of hard rock (in this case, Steve Vai) over pop music that is somehow not incogruous. It also has lyrics about being dangerous, and, like Jackson, you like the song but think "Aw, honey, nobody is ever going to be afraid of your badassery." There is a nice moment of Freddy Mercuryesque background vocals just before we hit the obligatory chant mantra portion at the end of the song. Unlike previous songs, I think the chant mantra well overstays its welcome on this track, and I thought about cutting it, but I like this song as a loud outlier. 12. Thunder rolls us into a soft woodwind vibe before we pop back into the Jason Mrazy acapella style pop of It Don't Matter, complete with hand claps and snaps. Jojo's presence on this track is delightfully playful, as are the trilling keyboards. 13. Tori Kelly absolutely drives Running Outta Love, a straight up R&B pop song that wouldn't feel out of place in the early 90s or the early 2000s. 14. Lizzy McAlpine takes over the lead vocals for Never Gonna Be Alone, with John Mayer on cosmic, echoey, guitar. This really feels like the end of a trilogy of songs that started with "It Don't Matter". I'm not sure if it's the three female lead vocalists, or if it's that Collier has a limited lyrical style, so it sounds like these songs are calling back to each other, though I'm pretty sure it's unintentional. 15. Closing out the album is the first song I heard when I started this project, He Won't Hold You. It's pure Collier. He comes back to helm the song as lead vocalist until the halfway mark when Rapsody enters to provide the inspirational rap breakdown. The album ends, of course, on a chant mantra with layered harmonies. As it should. What was my favorite album from 2022? Unquestionably, Gabriels's Angels And Queens. I had missed their EPs, and was far, far away from watching American Idol by the time lead singer Jacob Lusk was on it. But hearing this album made me find every track I could from this band, and all of them are on this album except one song, which commits the crime of being the only very good track by a band who consistently makes Otherworldly Perfect tracks. I'm not going to say much more about it as an album. You can get how I feel from the description of every track on this album. I can't wait to put together the next reimagined album in their discography. 1. We begin with chimes and a single bass strum before the voice comes in. The voice. Oh, god. Loyalty declares I ain't gonna stop loving you before a woman's voice, beautiful but lacking the lustre of the the main vocals, comes in for alternating verses. This song is so intrumentally spare and vocally lush that it actually earns the term "haunting'. This is a timeless song that could have been released in the 1930s or last week. This is one of those songs that, if you're fresh from a broken relationship absolutely Hurts to listen to, and yet has you reaching for whatever button on your device will let you listen to it just One More Time.
2. Some hand claps and swallowed consonants later, and we're in the Luther Vandross thick Blind. The first time the breakdown happens and reveals we are absolutely in the 21st century, it's a revelation. Lusk's trills are so precise and ... is there a proper antonym for quavering that still allows for vibration? It occured to me as I listened to this, that I had no idea about the quality of the lyrics because the vocals were so powerful that the lyrics almost didn't matter to me. They're really basic love pop but, damn, Lusk can make you feel anything with his voice. 3. On the flip side of this, the lyrics to Angels And Queens are fucken banger, and drenched with the sort of funk that the musicians of Silk Sonic, talented as they are, can only dream of inspiring to. This is the zenith of unrequieted love funk. And there's not a hint of the misogyny that Mars and Paak cant help but squeeze into every one of their songs. 4. I haven't really talked about the orchestration on some of these tracks, other than mentioning its timeless. Simultaneously super retro and futuristic. Blame is a perfect example of this, as Lusk's vocals sounds like a high pitched 1930s animated cartoon devil. As he sings a love song that coud double as a crushing civil rights anthem, a self-help track, or a gospel lamentation. ¿Por qué no todos? 5. There is a Nina Simone inspired lead in to Stranger with an absolute crushing harmony set against a shimmering guitar. It brings to mind the musical dexterity of Nick Cave and Tom Waits but with soulful vocals that's just beyond almost any other modern pop/rock/soul vocalist. The bridge soars. Reviewers and critics use that phrase pretty frequently, but I feel like, after you listen to this song, every other song's bridge merely floats. When the bass goes stacatto against the falsetto, it's actually transcendent. I had to blink, look around, and make sure I was actually still in my living room, awake, and merely listening to music. 6. I have easily heard dozens of covers of Screamin' Jay Hawkins's I Put A Spell On You. I don't need to hear any more. I wouldn't say this version invalidates the power of the original. No, Hawkins's original is an untouchable classic. But this violin-centric cover is what every slowed down, retro, Postmodern Jukebox style track inspires to be, but isn't quite. Not an homage. Merely, a second perfect version of a classic song. Hmmm, a third. I had almost forgot about the Nina Simone version, which would have been a crime. The skat vocals in the middle of this track are so tight that is he had trilled another millisecond, he would have split his DNA. 7. My partner loves flamingos. I don't know his stance on The Flamingos, but I think, with the possible exception of Lauryn Hill, they ourtight own doo-wop doo-wop. I would caution any other artist from trying to borrow or sample that seminal piece of music history. But The Gabriels, with just piano, bass, harmony, and finger snaps have stolen doo-wop doo-wop and tossed it into the heavens. In Loving Memory is a haunting, eternal, love song. 8. There are very few upbeat tracks on this album. But there is a 1970s soul groove to Remember Me that makes you want to toss on roller skates and just chill your way around a track for a few minutes. It's a Teddy Pendergrass track with ... I don't want to say Luther Vandross vocals because it's more than that but also reminiscent of that. It's almost like if Luther Vandross had squeezed the fuckboi out of CeeLo Green's range. 9. Innocence booms into the room. Is there a lyric in this song that isn't belted? Not so much. Is there a lyric in this song that needed more restraint? No. The quivering strings under the thunderous vocals and the occasional paino smash are pure musical theater carnage. Ain't love a hypocrite leaves the listener absolutely slain as the strings come back in. When the harmonies come in during the final verse, the audience of ghosts evaporates. 10. Another rare upbeat song, Taboo is very Gnarls Barkley era CeeLo Green. I know I mentioned him somewhat despairingly just a couple of paragraphs ago, but Green was a giant in modern soul and R&B, and if he'd released more songs like this istead of, uhh, being who he is, his name would still be on the tongues of every music fan. Lots of delightfully naughty words in this one. Totally worth every one. 11. Mama sounds more modern than almost any other track on this album. With its pitch-shifted mutterings in the background, and more relaxed vocals, this is one song I can imagine other modern artists covering and not embarrassing themselves. There's a little bit of Sampha's vocal stylings from (No One Knows Me) Like The Piano in this song, and I'm here for it. 12. The 1930's orchestral sound is back as lushly as possible in Bloodline. I can see this as a black and white animation. Again, the devil. But the sweetest devil. The most beguiling lover. The most inspirational crooner. 13. If You Only Knew with its spare piano trilling, and its gospel chorus, would be the highlight of almost anyone else's album. It's gorgeous, and instantly sing-alongable. I mean, you're not going to do the vocals any justice, but you're going to try. And you're going to geel good about singing. And yet, this isn't even close to the best song on this album. That's how aspirationally great this album is that this could be just an average track. Ooof. 14. Back to the mid-20th century cinema we go for To The Moon And Back. That touch of Nina in the delivery. Those muted, echoey background vocals. The song drenches you in music. Most songs, when I'm into them, I feel like I'm in the room listening to the artist perform them. Here, I fell like I'm sitting in the center of a room with the music surrounding me. The vocals are from everywhere. Every instrument in the orchestra is directed at a different bone, organ, or muscle in my body. It is radiating every pore. 15. We break out of that song with an upbeat piano riff, and some classic 70s soul vocals. One And Only is a Stand Up And Dance anthem. It brings a kind of musical joy I haven't felt since Lizzo dropped Good As Hell. It's a song that makes you want to strut, even if you would look absolutely ridiculous doing it. 16. Gabriels recorded a short film version of "Love And Hate In A Different Tme" which ends with Lusk's performance of Strange Fruit through a megaphone at a Black Lives Matter protest. I prefer flipping the order of these two songs but, ooof do they play beautifully off each other. 17. So we close out with the aforementioned Love And Hate In A Different Time. It's not the best banger from this album. Not the smoothest ballad. But it's the kind of song where I can see credits rolling over it. It has a much different style of background vocals than anything else on this album. Alvvays Reimagined Discography For Nostalgic 90s Kids Seeking New Music In Their Middle Age12/28/2022 For 2023, I'm trying to listen to recent bands who either flew under my radar, or whose work I didn't give enough attention to because I'm older, and radio is pretty much dead, and I prefer listening to the music I've purchased from the unscrupulous 20th and 21st century record companies than Spotify, which still gives money to the unscrupulous record companies but adds another layer of scum on top of it. I'm perusing people's Best Of 201x or 202x lists, buying what sounds good to me, and then doing what I usually do with music I like, paring it down to the songs I love. Alvvays most recent album showed up on several Best Of 2022 lists, and I remembered hearing one of their songs enough times that the name Alvvays registered but I didn't have a feel for the band. Having listened to their first two albums a few times each now, I feel comfortable recommending it to people who really loved 90s music indie soundtracks. Not necessarily Super Underground Films, but things more along the lines of Pump Up The Volume, Run Lola Run, and Clerks which had soundtracks that looked forward rather than the nostalgia fueled Quentin Tarantino flicks or the Seattle focused Singles Soundtrack. This is a melodically and tempo-diverse set of songs that have one thing in common: sludgy female vocals buried too deep in the mix. It's a style that seemed super big in the early to mid-nineties. I don't hate it, or I wouldn't have bothered making this album, but I generally prefer the vocals to be a bit clearer than they're going to be on any of these tracks. 1. Lottery Noises is the perfect opening track for this album, as it has an ambient start with clear lyrics and then the wall of guitars come in to bury Molly Rankin's vocals. It's an uplifting montage song shot with a shaky black and white handheld camera. There's lots of running, and it's unclear whether it's playfully or purposefully away from whoever is holding the camera.
2. The 80s drumbeat and new wavey effects may give you the hint that Very Online Guy is going to be an 80s throwback, but then there's the vocals, and it's no mistake that the crew in the studio was wearing flannel. The video is very borderline 80s/90s. More dial-up than DSL, certainly. Like many of the tracks, I don't really get a sense of the lyrics because they're so deep in the mix. But, as you might guess, they're about a troll. 3. On the flipside, the lyrics on Your Type are easy to discern, though they're no more clearer here than on any other track. But it's a Very 90s unrequited love track with a bouncy beat and an almost 80s/early 90s REM delivery. 4. Velveteen is the most most 90s soundtrack closing song on the album. Any video would just be credits rolling. Winona Rider, Clare Danes, or Christian Slater is the lead. There's a climbing synthesizer in the background that contrasts very nicely with the muddy lyrics. The vocals skyrocket nearly into head voice at the end, and it's beautiful. 5. The early lyrics in Forget About Life grab me more than any other lyrics on the album so far. I adore the spare arrangement, and the way the synth gets called out in the lyrics just after it starts to buzz a riff that most groups would have put on guitar. Then we get the piano sound building into the background before the song crashes into instrumental break. It's probably my favorite song on the album, and it's definitely the make out scene in the film that the audience has been waiting for. I especially love the wavy outro. 6. The blooby intro to Hey weaves wonderfully with "Forget About Life"'s outro, and then introduces a very 80s U2 guitar effect over the usual grungesurftar melody. It's definitely a head bopper as it bounces between Garbage and The Cardigans. If "Forget About Life" is the single from this album, this should be the B-Side. 7. I've said a couple of times that the lyrics aren't usually the main draw for me on this album but College education is a dull knife cut right through me. Yeup. You can perfectly hear the despair of going to college because it's what's expected of you in Easy On Your Own. I didn't quite feel like I was in my early 20s again but I definitely felt like those nights where I waks up in a panic because I dreamed I had to go back to school. 8. Belinda Says is a perfect follow up, as it talks about moving back to the country and just seeing how life goes if you surrender to it. The driving guitars near the end are gorgeous. 9. I'm not sure which track from Empire Records, After The Earthquake sounds like but it absolutely jangles like it belongs there. There's even a Gin Blossomy guitar riff. But then there's a beautiful extended breakdown before we get back to the sort of rock-y climax. 10. Not My Baby is another montage song. The instrumental intro is catchy as hell, and then the whole Now that I'm not your baby / I can do whatever I want makes for a delicious chew of gum. It's perfectly paced, and its echoey background vocals are used with just the right level of restraint. 11. Closing out the album proper (you'll see what I mean by that soon), is Dreams Tonite is the most Cardigans song on the album. It's so chill and inviting. The lyrics are so basic, you feel like you have the song memorized as soon as it starts. But that's not a complaint. It's nice to end on something familiar, and the way it echoes out at the end? *Chef's kiss* Here's my confession. I thought Alvvays had only put out two albums. I'd simply never come across their first album. But while I was putting this together, I did some research and, oops. But I gave the album a listen. It's definitely my least favorite of the three, but there are a few tracks I'd be remiss to not include, so I'm including them as a Bonus Disc. BD1. Adult Diversion is the lo-fi intro that really hinted at the band's trajectory. It buries the echoey vocals under the wall of guitar. It's a song about unrequieted love that breaks no ground and has a very flat melody. But it's still catchy. BD2. Archie, Marry Me is more Cranberries than any other tracks on the album. It's better written, lyrically, but Rankin's vocals have that sharp O'Riordan quality that I miss in modern pop. and BD3. Actually closing the album out is Red Planet, which sounds like if early Phil Collins wrote video game music. Spare drums. 8-Bit Synth. It ends with effects rather than a fade out. Everyone has a band or two that seems like it should fit comfortably on their emotional/mental playlist but that they just can't get into. I have a few: The Who, Elvis Costello, and ABBA being the ones that spring immediately to mind. I don't dislike any of them enough that I'm likely to skip their track if it shows up on a random playlist, but I never feel like I'm looking forward to their music. I thought, of the three, ABBA was the one I could most likely sift through their discography for an album of music I liked. I was not mistaken. This is nowhere near a Greatest Hits album. I don't like a lot of their hits. They released twenty-three singles in the 70s and 80s. Six of them appear here, and two of them are heavily edited. I didn't really reach into their B-Side catalogue but I listened to each of their albums a few times, and found some gems that didn't sound as bland as their hits but we're definitely recognizable as ABBA. I find that much of their material reeks of the filler music from rock musicals. Either spare ballads choking with loneliness in the lyrics but almost blandly sung or wildly overproduced orchestral pop that buries the vocals in the mix. I tried not to include (m)any of those songs on this album. I wanted to reward them for those times that they took musical risks that paid off. A tropical themed lovesong, a funk song about a creepy old rich guy, a hand clappy punk song. Of course Dancing Queen is on here, and a few other songs that I imagine everyone who's ever heard of ABBA, and a few who haven't, have heard before. But this is mostly ABBA stretching their wings and playing out of their 1970s AM radio comfort zone. I was going to include stuff off their reunion album but then I listened to it. There weren't any risks taken. I'm calling this album The 1980's Theater Tech Kids Backstage Makeout Playlist somewhat ironically. It's what I would call the album filled with all the popular ABBA songs that I didn't include on this reimagined album, and ABBA Spreads Its Wings just sounds like a predictably 1970s ABBA album. 1. Of course, if there's a track that begins with clockwork, or just the ticking of seconds passing, and the song is good, I'm probably going to use it as an opening track. For this album, that track is Like An Angel Passing Through My Room. It's almost a Bonnie Tyler ballad with the edges sanded off of her vocals. It's almost a 20th Century Disney ballad. It's the kind of track that you'd think would just be one verse, but it does go to a second one without overstaying its welcome. It's incredibly well-produced as a music box song. If you'd told me it was off their reunion album from 2021, I'd believe you, as it has a wistful nostalgia to it.
2. As the clock continues to tick down, we move to another really well-produced track. This one is a very 80's tropical cheesy dance number, though it was recorded in 1974. It seems so soaked in a Hawaiian shirt, that I'd have sworn it came out ten years later. Sitting In The Palm Tree is one of the rare tracks that I'm including with Björn on lead vocals. 3. Lay All Your Love On Me is the first track that, to me, sounds Totally ABBA. Unlike the first two tracks, this one pops up on their Greatest Hits collections. It's overly orchestrated with a disco beat and the weirdly uninteresting and uninterested vocals that I associate the band with. But this one is bright and poppy enough and, again, like many ABBA songs, sounds to me like it came off the Hair Soundtrack. It was clearly influential on Ace Of Base and Madonna. It could have easily been an overly produced remix track from Like On A Prayer. 4. The last track ends on applause, which makes it easy for me to do an edit. Look, the rise to the excellent chorus of Fernando is exquisite. And, it's nice that is isn't just a bland love song. But the song is too long for me, so I spliced out the first verse and chorus so that you only get the best parts of the track. I have no regrets about this. 5. Nina Pretty Ballerina begins with a train whistle is early early days ABBA. It's silly pop but there is slightly more emotion in the vocals than in later tracks. And it's just a fun song about an office worker who dances her heart out on weekends. I'd put it on-par with a Beatles B-side. The football style audience chants during the song help propel it into my heart. 6. While on the subject of office workers living out fantasies, Anni-Frid gets the bouncy anti-capitalist ditty, Money, Money, Money. This could have definitely come off an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical from before he started wholesale plagiarizing other artists while calling himself a composer. Allegedly. 7. The Visitors is easily my favorite ABBA album. It's a little darker, it's got tight 80s production, and you can tell the band is going through the kind of turmoil tha turns out albums like Fleetwood Mac's Rumors. This track also has some early Genesis prog rock vibes with a deliberately flat tonality that also has late Beatles vibes but with a hand clappy 80s chorus. 8. Another of ABBA's Greatest Hits wildly edited. I really don't like Mamma Mia. It's breakdown is So Excellent, but everything around it I find forgettable. So you get one verse, one breakdown, one chorus, and a fadeout, which is all you really need from it. 9. On the flipside you get the full version of another Tropical Loveland song. It's definitely more recognizable as an ABBA song but it's also got that soft rock colonialism We Sailed Our Ship To This Island Once So Its Musical Cultural Is Now Ours feel to it. It's a very bouncy ooooooooooooooooh song. 10. The halfway point of the album happens at the crux of tracks 10 and 11, so you're welcome to think of SOS as the end of Side A. Though it would be a better start to Side B. This is one of their hits, and I understand why. This is another case of a song that's a bit over-orchestrated. It's a little too dense to be fun. But it's still catchy. 11. And look, I really don't think you can have an ABBA album without Dancing Queen. This was the first track I heard by them, and realized I'd heard it covered several times before I ever heard the original. It could easily be creepy, being a song about how attractive a teenager is. If one of the men sang this, it could be on Ephebophilia Top Forty (don't look that up). Instead, it's a woman seeing a little bit of herself in the beautiful girl on the dance floor. Much more palatable. This also suffers from overproduction but the piano chops through the noise just enough to be endearing. 12. When All Is Said And Done marches out of the fadeout from the previous track. It's a closing time song with a good hook, and one of those cool 70s songs where the music flashes into a sort of breakdown where there's still a ton of noise around the vocals but it's ... less noise than in the rest of the song. 13. I love funk. At my last retail job, the owner was also really into funk, so our store played funk all the time, and it was glorious. The bass here is completely 100% funk certified. Man In The Middle is another song that drops the age "seventeen" but isn't creepy, as it's about watching a rich guy who loves to be in the spotlight. 14. We leave funkytown for Italy and more orchestral grandeur, this time with 80s country style vocals. This Italy is funkytown adjacent, though, as it also has a shiny 70s bassline. One Of Us isn't a folky song about possibly seeing God on a bus, but a lyrically bland song about how love is sad that rhymes lying with crying. 15. King Kong Song is the crunchiest song on this album. Heavy (for Abba) guitars and the vocals having a punk wall of sound quality in the background while the actual background vocals are pitched into the foreground with a doo-wop style. It's a wild, dumb ride with an almost Queen sort of hand clap percussion. It's got definite Banana Splits vibes. 16. If you've ever been trapped in an elevator on the way to a job interview, you've probably heard something that sounded remarkably like My Mama Said. I know that sounds like a diss, but there's something appealing about this song, whcih also has vocals that are absolutely buried in the mix for no reason. 17. Why Joan Jett hasn't released a cover of Hey Hey Helen, I'll never know. Maybe she thought it would be redundant? There is a funk breakdown near the end of this song that makes virtually no sense, as it's otherwise as new wave punk rock as ABBA ever gets. 18. Returning to the bright and bouncy technopop from earlier on this album, Head Over Heels is another song where I can't tell you why I like it more than most other ABBA songs. It's mostly the squeaky clean production. 19. A whispery Every Musical In The 80s and 90s vocal drags us into the piano an ooooooh ballad, Kisses Of Fire, that then slams us into pop. It's a perfect transition. Something about this song makes me want to hear Lizzo cover it. It doesn't sound like a Lizzo song at all, and there isn't a flute solo or anything, I just think this song is due for another single release, and I think she'd spin it in a fantastic direction. 20. ABBA has precisely one banger in their arsenal. One perfect song from beginning to end, and it's Take A Chance On Me. Every piece of this musical puzzle fits snugly together from the disco vocals to the occasional doo-wop background vocals to the occasional spoken line, it's just expertly crafted. No other song by the band can possibly follow it, so we let it fade the album out. Phil Collins peaked with this, his first solo album. I'm not sad that the albums that follow exist but none of them even attempt to capture the restrained intensity of this album. It definitely sounds related to the late 70s/early 80s Genesis output than his later, more poppy albums. While it definitely still falls into the Soft Rock category, it's not quite the Limp Rock he'd soon embrace. 1. Tomorrow Never Knows
First a slow snare, then a pounding bass drum rise out of squeaking whistles. Someone is breaking through a wall of progressive rock. When the vocals hit, they don't sound like lilting Genesis. The timbre is there but there is a sharper enunciation. While still definitely something you could hear on soft rock radio, this jagged Beatles cover sets a menacing but upbeat tone for this, in my opinion, best album to come out of any member of Genesis. 2. In The Air Tonite Peak Genesis. Peak Collins. Peak drum fill. Peak creepy. I've loved this song since I was in elementary school. I sighed and nodded when it was used in NBA commercials. Overplayed? Oh yea. But with reason. It's the most iconic song he was ever a part of. 3. If Leaving Me Is Easy This is the smokey pop ballad on every late 70s/early 80s album. It's the drippiest track on what is, otherwise, a pretty restrained album. There is, of course, obligatory 80s sad sax on the intro and outro. 4. I Missed Again Horns! Big checkered suits! Jilted lover! Near-falsetto! Basic Betty chorus! Catchy lyrics! Only cheesily dancable! This is the upbeat song that this album doesn't actually need. It's great, and it has the sound production vibe that is pretty much exclusive to this one Phil Collins album. It's just so much happier than this mostly monotone album. The sax is as neutral as it can be but it's overpowered by the brightest horns in this discography. 5. Thunder & Lightning Maybe this album isn't as monotone as I remember? The horns get no less dull on this song that sounds somewhere between early 80s Billy Joel and late 70s Genesis. How come this feels so nice? Phil asks. And, yea, why does it? I never remember this song when I'm thinking of the album but it's definitely catchy, inoffensive album rock. It even has a fairly listenable guitar solo between all the horn breaks and hand claps. 6. The Roof Is Leaking This is the song I tend to think of when I remember this album. Oh, sure, "In The Air Tonite" is unquestionably both the best and most well-known track, but this spare track with it's weirdly country-esque twang just seems to best embody the album. The lyrics are passionate, and Phil definitely puts the right spin on them but he's not straining or completely rocking out. He soft rocks the piano out of this not quite ballad. It also has crickets as an intro and outro, which is Very 80s version of alternative. 7. Droned This track really feels like a continuation of "The Roof Is Leaking". The floating piano starts to brighten and increase in volume, while the synths remain in the spooky background. This is a sort of instrumental track. There are wordless chant style vocals. And drums, of course. It's a very percussive track. 8. Hand In Hand The 80s tried to be very tropical for a while. More organic drum sounds, a wider variety of woodwinds, and a spare ... chiminess to the sounds. This is another instrumental track that gives the impression of a spooky atmospheric piece but then the drums and horns kick in proper, and it starts to morph into an 80s TV theme song. A sitcom about a family of grifters. We also get the return of those non-word chanty vocals. 9. This Must Be Love The title gives the impression that we're going back to the weepy sax of "If Leaving Me Is Easy", but nah. We're continuing with the tropical beat, pushing the synth back into the forefront, and Phil's vocals have a restrained, whispery quaver. It really doesn't feel like a love song at all. I really appreciate its incongruence. This isn't a "Wow, I'm so happy, THIS must be love." It's more a "I thought I had indigestion but it turns out this is as close to happy as I can get right now." 10. I'm Not Moving We kick the falsetto up higher. And the piano and drums return to 80s Billy Joel level, as Phil sings a much more wishy-washy version of Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down". This is as close to New Wave as Collins ever gets. It has vocoded background vocals, which is one of the better uses of vocoded vocals I can think of. 11. Behind The Lines This is the only song on the album that I believe sounds more like a B-side. It's definitely from the neighborhood of "I Missed Again". It's not quite as catchy. The brightness seems a bit tarnished, and the lyrics are an instructino manual for introspection. t's weird that this track works as part of any Phil Collins album, but it definitely fits here. 12. You Know What I Mean The crickets are back! The piano goes from Billy Joel to Meatloaf/Bonnie Raitt territory. Phil's vocals are suddenly 70s singer/songwriter. very broody and more natural than anywhere else on this album. If there was a video for this song, it would take place in the rain. There would be a hole in an umbrella. The camera would be looking down at Phil's upturned face as someone he loved walked away from him. 13. I Don't Care Anymore This is technically from Phil's next album, but it Belongs To This One. I love this song with an equal passion as I do for "in The Air Tonite". I love the snarl to the vocals. The strict drums. The teen angst lyrics. I also love how it threatens to fade out, and then just stops in a nearly acapella fashion. It's a great end to this weird album. Much of my reimagined discographies center around bands I know inside and out. I've owned every album. I've listened to them at least dozens of time. Years ago, I consolidated them to my favorite tracks. Some of these, however, are learning experiences for me. This Genesis discography is a little of each. I'm totally familiar with all of the Genesis albums. I know the post-80s output of Peter Gabriel. I've lived through all of Phil Collins career at a time when I was very impressionable. I've owned the first two Mike + The Mechanics albums. But until this project, I'd never listened to a Steve Hackett solo album. It's just not my thing. Steve Hackett is one of the primary reasons 70s Genesis sounds so prog rocky. And prog rock is something that doesn't hold my heart the way alternative rock,conscious hip-hop, 70s funk, or girl group R&B does. I can respect it. And, sure, in the late 90s, I owned every Rush album that they'd put out, which is at least seven million albums. But I wasn't popping on a Rush album and going for a walk. Same with Steve Hackett's material. I respect it. I recognize why some tracks are more popular with his fans than others, but his stuff isn't really aimed at me so it doesn't hit me just right. I debated doing a White Album approach, including tracks from the various solo members to make a more diverse sounding album, but, ultimately that would lead to me skipping around tracks when I listened to it, so I decided to keep things By Artist. While Peter Gabriel was the first member to leave and have a big solo career, Hackett is the first departure who's post-Genesis material still sounds Very Genesis. I've pieced this together from his first three albums. I was going to use his first five but as soon as Deflector, his fourth album, started playing I said, out loud "Ok, this is when he decided to something new." I'm excited to get to that era of his solo work. But I like what's here. It's Way More Instrumental than almost any reimagined album I've put together/am ever going to put together. He just has more instrumental tracks in his output, and, well...some of the vocals on his non-instrumental tracks are too treacly 70s or wannabe spacey vocoder vibes for my taste. 1. Clocks
The other day, I turned on the toaster and ended up with "No Son Of Mine" being stuck in my head for an hour. Metronomic drums are Monster Earworms. This track is like an even more soundtrackey version of Pink Floyd's "Money". It sounds very 70s in the way that a lot of soundtracks to 80s movies with low budgets sounded very 70s. This isn't a bad thing. But I see cops walking the beat while credits roll to this song. The rolling guitar riff in the middle is where the names of the cameo actors pop up. It is a completely instrumental track. 2. Ballad Of The Decomposing Man In an alternate dimension, this is the theme song to a very silly British sitcom that only your coolest friends know about. It's got a mid-era Kinks vibe, a Monty Python vibe, and an out of nowhere, and yet recurring, Honkey Tonk section. The lyrics are very silly. It's a working class carnival dirge, and 100% my favorite Hackett track that I've heard so far. I would put this on a Greatest Hits of Genesis album as a counterpoint to "I Know What I Like". I fucken love this song, and wish I'd encountered it earlier in my life. 3. Kim I'm going to put aside my prejudice against this name. This a is a beautiful, haunting instrumental flute and guitar ballad. I love how the strum and the mournful flute play off each other. I also appreciate that it does all it needs to in two minutes and then ends before it wears out its welcome. I do imagine this track plays on loop at a theme park with long ride lines. It's very calming. 4. Hermit Now we're back to early Kinks or 70s British hippie rock. Bands who listened to The Beatles but falsely viewed them as peers instead of inspiration. There's a sweet orchestral feel to it (again, lots of flute bouncing off guitars) . This is the outro music to a Lord Of The Rings knockoff from the 70s. Instead of a ring in a volcano, they need to throw a necklace into the sea while hiding from someone who is represented by a giant ear. 5. Hoping Love Will Last Have you ever wondered what would early Genesis sound like if they had a talented soul/r&b female vocalist? You have? Really? WHY? How high were you? Well, it turns out, it's a good mix. It's definitely montage music for a 70s romance flick with a creepy vibe. Something they showed late in the afternoons on 1980s television stations that weren't affiliated with NBC, CBS, or ABC. Definitely Dialing For Dollars material. But damn does Randy Crawford sing the absolute shit out of this song. 6. Every Day If you liked "Dance On A Volcano" by Genesis, here's its natural follow up. It sounds like it would fit right in on the post-Steve Hackett Genesis albums. Its vocals are by Pete Hicks, who I am unfamiliar with, but his harmonies with Hackett have a very Kansas vibe. But with definite Hackett Genesis guitar riffs. This would be in some crunchy coming of age sci-fi movie. Something Last Starfightery. 7. Icarus Ascending Richie Havens serves as vocalist for the song that most sounds like it could have been played on commercial radio. I mean, the first section. There is a long schwoozy Mellatron infused breakdown in the middle before the vocals kick back in. Any movie with this on the soundtrack would have been written by someone who took the job to maintain their coke habit. It's eclectic and I can't decide whether I like the way it's sort of folky pop r&b, and then it's definitvely prog rock, and then it's some haunted hybrid. I think I do. I do much prefer the first half to the second. That sun is just too damned close. 8. Hands Of The Priestess (Part 1) Another instrumental track. This is a flute ballad callback. Very New Age store trying to sell you crystals to soothe your chronic arthritis. It could also pop up in the soundtrack to a movie just after the love interest has died and the emo protagonist is trying to go about their life. There is a fake fade-out where, when it fades back in, it's just peppier enough to give you hope that things are going to be okay. Maybe. 9. Star Of Sirius Somewhere between Kansas and Genesis is this harmony-vocaled track to close out the album. It feels like the logical musical conclusion to this album, and yet also a bridge to post-Hackett Genesis. It's definitely the scene in an adventure movie where the clouds clear and, whether everything is better or not, the characters are moving on to the next stage in their lives. There's even a na na na na sort of chorus before Hackett reminds us that this is Still A Prog Rock record. The 1970s saw the birth of Super Groups. Rock and roll bands filled with legendary members of already famous bands, or successful solo artists, coming together to form commercial rock monsters. Cream, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Led Zeppelin, Journey. Genesis is a reverse-engineered supergroup. Nobody knew these theatre kid rockers with their flutes and special effect noises, recording their best Beatles riffs underwater and then stuffing a four minute jam solo in the middle of it. They were just a transient band credited with being one of the earliest progressive rock bands, and creating some of the most successful solo artists and side projects of 1980s pop. When their lead singer and, arguably, most interesting songwriter decided to go solo, they replaced him with their third drummer, and not only became More Commercially Successful, but also elevated him until he was one of the most successful artists of the 1980s. When I was a college student in Florida, I was asked to audition for a prog rock band that was forming in Gainesville. Not because I had The Best Voice In Florida but because, when they asked me if I knew any prog rock bands, I was the only one who could name someone other than Rush or Dream Theater (but it was really only Yes, Genesis, and Queesryche). I ended up not joining the band because, honestly, I don't like most prog rock. Even much of early Genesis just isn't my thing. When I was first discovering rock music as a pre-teen, Genesis was the Phil Collins pop rock band. And I loved them. I don't think I knew Peter Gabriel had been a member until I was in high school. Shortly after We Can't Dance hit, they released a couple of live albums. One of them called The Way We Walk 2: The Longs, which included several early songs that I'd been unfamiliar with. So when I went away to high school and started spending too much money on albums, I tracked down as many early Genesis albums as I could find. This first album is really an early Best Of Genesis album. Sorry. I've listened to all their albums. Like many prog rock bands, I recognize their talent and complicated sound. But I'm not often longing to listen to eight minute slow build rock symphonies. I just don't get high enough. That's not a dig. I think there is a lot to early Genesis that I haven't been willing to take the time to properly appreciate. But here's what I like of their early work. 1. I Know What I Like
I love an opening track that climbs from silence. Slap a brief spoken word piece on it before the melody kicks in, and it's going to be the track I choose to open an album. I know what I like / and I like what I know. The vocal melding of Gabriel and Collins is lush here. This was the first song that charted, coming seven years after they dropped their first album. It really makes me think of a charming small-cast play in a black box theater. 2. Misunderstanding Their first 80s hit, this is clearly a transition from progressive rock to pop rock. It's gott some background wooooo-oooo-ooohs behing Phil Collins's lead vocals. There's something both very Beach Boys and very early Phil Collins solo work about it. It's catchy but you might feel guilty if anyone saw you singing along to this in your car. 3. Turn It On Again Sticking with the transition period of Duke is this fun track. I promise there's more Peter Gabriel tracks coming on this album. It's way chronologically out of order. But I love Collins's vocals on this. It just feels close to his work on Face Value, which is my favorite Collins album by a wide stretch. 4. ABACAB We reach all the way into 1981 for this somewhat grimier rock. This is more of an evolution of prog rock than the previous tracks. But synthy. Definitely more synthy than early Genesis. But fear not, it's not as synthy as C- New Wave rock. It really works to the band's strength here. It's an organic part of a long jam break. 5. The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway Ok, now we're going back to the early 70s Gabriel era for the intro track to the one of the greatest Broadway Rock Shows to never actually be performed. I won't get into the plot. But if you're curious, the whole album, for which this is the title track, is solid. I didn't know that when I first heard it. I just enjoyed the progression of several different musical tricks, and the very simple chorus. It's so Clearly a rock musical track. Jesus Christ Superstar, Tommy. It's very catchy in a very different ways from the earlier Collins tracks. 6. Follow You Follow Me Before Collins became the centerpiece of the group, Genesis had a rotating cast of five or six members. And Then There Were Three signalled one of their final evolutions, which was also their most long-tenured and successful. Phil Collins is certainly soft rocky. But this song still has a heavy foot in prog rock instrumentation. This is the closing tack to that album. I think it works better as a bridge between Gabriel Theater Rockers. 7. The Musical Box This is the earliest, and also longest, track on the album. The opening song on Nursery Cryme, which is the eldest album I bought from them in high school. The harmonies are beautiful. The flutes are oh so happy 1970s. It's a lovely, sleepy lullaby dream sequence. 8. Firth Or Fifth Another early Gabriel track. This is very prog rock, and oh so 70s. There are a ton of great instrumental breaks on this, from Banks's opening piano solo to Gabriel's soothing flute to Hackett replaying the flute melody on the guitar. It's gorgeous. In live shows they segue the guitar section into "I Know What I Like" and it's perfect. 9. Dance On A Volcano From the first Gabriel-less album, this song is mostly catchy riff and chorus. Collins hasn't yet figured out his Lead Singer vibe, but that's ok. It's kind of fun to have a track that sounds like it's just instrumental track and background vocals. It's also a bit of a preview of Face Value era Phil Collins. I also enjoy how it sort of deflates at the end, which brings us to the melancholic 10. More Fool Me This is such a sweet, sad little Peter Gabriel number. It's shorter and poppier than most of his era, and sounds nothing like his later solo work. And yet, if it showed up as a slight departure track on any album in any era of his career, you'd sort of nod and go "Ok, I can see that." 11. The Light Dies Down On Broadway Even though it's not the album that I love the most from their early work, if you were to ask me which early Genesis album held up the best as an album, it's definitely The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. This is a great callback to the earlier, title track from that album. 12. ...In That Quiet Earth The previous track descends into ambient noise, and this sort of climbs out of it with a drum solo. A proper Phil Collins at the top of his game drum solo. This is the sole instrumental track on the album. Can you have a prog rock album without at least one? This is the one I like the best, and I love how it segues from the previous track to this album's finale. 13. Afterglow A fitting end to this album, I think. It's the last track of Wind & Wuthering. It's not too far after the departure of Peter Gabriel, and it's the last track with Steve Hackett. It just feels like a closing track. It's got some ethereal "ahhhhhhhhing" to fade out on. If you want the complete mainstream Meatloaf experience, you can simply listen to the original versions of Bat Out Of Hell and Bat Out Of Hell 2. That was really it for radio's love affair with Meat Loaf. He was great in the late 1970s, he disappeared for the 80s, and emerged triumphantly in the 90s for an encore. Sure, VH1 played some videos from a couple of albums after Bat Out Of Hell 2, but that was about it. But Meat Loaf put out a dozen albums, not including live albums and a greatest hits collection. Surely there were things on those albums worth listening to. And, let's be real, neither of the first two Bat Out Of Hell albums were flawless. The first one was intriguing rock opera from the 1970s. Very Paul Williams. Very Rocky Horror. But do I want to listen to all of those songs? Not really. So here is a condensed discography of the songs that I enjoy listening to from the nearly 50 year career of Mr. Loaf. 1. This album is all about bombast and cheese and musical theater singalongs. So even though the title track is the basis of Meatloaf's career, I'm not including it. It's pretty much a sin that the original album didn't start with the completely ridiculous dialogue from the intro to You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth. I'd be shocked to find out that this isn't in the top ten most performed duets in karaoke history. It's a hit from the stilted intro all the way to the hand clap fade out.
2. I'll be jumping around Meatloaf's 80s albums (and the real Bat Out Of Hell) because thy all tend to suffer from a sameness of sound. Each one has a particular drone where even the ballads and bangers tend to sound indistinguishable after a while. I don't think it's true of his whole discography, so I'm going to go from 77 to 88 to 83, etc. Burning Down is a synth and saxaphone track, which is about as 80s as you can get. It's got a hint of Miami Vice to it, and the choir who sings the chorus is vintage musical theater. 3. From synths and saxaphones to a country-esque foot stomper. Midnight At The Lost & Found is just silly and fun. 4. Meat Loaf has claimed that Jim Steinman wrote Air Supply's "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" for him, but gave it to them during a time when there was a financial dispute between them. If that's true, it seems like Cheatin' In Your Dreams is his revenge, as it seems very 80s soft rock. He eventually gets to his usual belty vocals, but it's very soft and smooth for the first half of the song. It ends like a lost track from Little Shop Of Horrors. 5. Back to the hits from the first album! Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad is a classic piano crooner with some of the cheesiest lyrics commited to paper. 6. Given how they share a songwriter, it's a pity that Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler didn't work together. But Meat Loaf did work with Cher on Dead Ringer For Love, which definitely sounds like an outtake from either the original Bat Out Of Hell or maybe Rocky Horror Picture Show. 7. The low end of the piano bangs in through the end of "Dead Ringer For Love" before it gets layered into a very 80s build-a-ballad. It's a weird conceit, I'm Going To Love Her For Both Of Us talks about how he wants an abusive boyfriend to let him date his partner because Meat Loaf will treat her right. He's not singing to her that he's going to rescue her, he's singing to the abusive boyfriend that he needs to do the right thing and let Meat Loaf have the relationship with her so that everyone can be happy. 8. Before recording his own albums, Meat Loaf was a touring member of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar and, or course, The Rocky Horror Show. If You Really Want To is a weird little nugget of a love song that, much like some tracks from the first two of those musicals, seems to be building to a belting verse that never comes. It's a rhythmic rock lullaby. It's not a ballad, it's just got a very repetitive bass and rhythm. I get drawn in at the beginning, and then I'm trapped there for the rest of the song. 9. Some times, I see two track titles, and think "I hope those fit together." Thus we fllow up "If You Really Want To" with the ballady Everything Is Permitted. It soars. Something about Loaf's vocals sound vaguely sour, though. Like a mediocre opera singer. It's still better than most rock musicians, but it's certainly not of the caliber of the Bat Out Of Hell albums. 10. Getting Away With Murder could be any 80s soundtrack song. I can't even place who it sounds like because it just sounds like upbeat 80s soundtrack rock track #4. It's catchy and inoffensive, despite the title. You can almost see him wearing Raybans, and a white suit with a Hawaiian shirt under the blazer. 11.We knock it back down a notch for a little John Cougar Mellancampy blue collar work song. Piece Of The Action is like barely pre-Bon Jovi narrative rock about how it's tough to have a job, and how you've got to dream big, baby. 12. Another of the original hits, Paradise By The Dashboard Light fits in perfectly here. You can see the co-leads doing a little Fosse as the background singers ooo-bop-bop in the background. 13. While I feel like a lot of 80s Meat Loaf songs do go Nowhere Fast, this particular rocker is a fun little stand-in for "Hot Patootie". If you stripped the vocal tracks away, this could be a cool Nintendo theme song. Probably Ice Man or Cut Man from the original Mega Man game. 14. Despite namedropping Virginia and California at the beginning of the song, The Promised Land sounds like Alabama or The Oak Ridge Boys might have recorded this very American song about moving from city to city and state to state. 15. "Promised Land" blends right into Bad Attitude, Meat Loaf's song about how the old squares hated his freedom, man. The guitars are very Queen, but they're sadly buried in the mix. 16. One More Kiss (Night Of The Soft Parade) is a spare piano ballad for soft rock radio. There's a lot of whispery singing to kick this song off. It does eventually build to belting with a set of female background singers to levitate his pleas. 17. From pleas to threats we go, as I'll Kill You If You Don't Come Back has some of the worst, cheesiest lyrics on this album (which is a high bar). How do you abuse me/ Let me count the ways is so Roger Rabbit that it makes me laugh. 18. If you've ever wondered what a Huey Lewis & The News song would sound like if it had a chorus of female vocalists, wonder no more. Blind Before I Stop has a touch of Robert Palmer, and a touch of generic 80s girl rock band. 19. We close off the album with what should have been the closing ballad for the real Bat Out Of Hell, Heaven Can Wait. It's a pleasant unwind. I didn't know Brigham Young from Neil Young until one of them was playing guitar on stage with Pearl Jam at the MTV Video Music Awards. I didn't immediately go and hungrily hunt down Neil's previous work, though. Instead, I waited for his next album, which I kind of liked, then got one of his earlier albums, and wasn't in the right head space for it, so I stopped seeking his work out. Mea culpa. But this era of Neil Young's work from the late eighties to the early nineties is the era I most enjoy. An angry forty-year old man still yelling at the system while playing loud guitars with a bunch of twenty and thirty year olds. Sign me up. The synths are gone man. Someone plugged in an electric guitar, and Neil Young tried to reinvent the 1970s. Cocaine Eyes is pure Before I Was Born rock. The song uses the word soul a bit too much for my liking, but he's back to pushing his falsetto until it breaks, and I am Here For It. Listen to those guitars wail at the end. Welcome back, Neil.
White Lines seems to be, I don't want to say on the nose, but thematically related to the previous track. This song was actually written and recorded in the 1970s, but Young didn't release it until 1990 when he gave it a heavier guitar sound. But the background vocals are pure 1970s AM radio rock. A light departure from all the guitars shows up with in the form of Inca Queen. The long instrumental intro, vamps, and outro would usually preclude me from including this song. It's long. Like a live performance from one of The Eagles Hell Freezes Over Tour tracks long. And, at times, it sounds like the kind of rock you could hear playing softly in the background at a resort your grandparents would rent in New Mexico. But I like it. It seems to know what it is, embraces it, and just refuses to end. We stay chill and southern for a track with The Blue Notes...sorry, Ten Men Working. This song about lost love and cars, Coupe De Ville, would have felt nearly at home on The Damage Done. It's so Retro In The 1970s, you can almost imagine Roberta Flack or Linda Rondstadt covering it. Eldorado bubbles up through the end of the previous track with a a Very Latin lick and ... castinets? Whle there are some guitar crunches, this continues to give the impression that this album has settled into soft rock. Twilight does nothing to change your mind about the softness of this album. It's an occasional electric guitar plucked lovingly over saxophones, a very metronomic drum beat, and lyrics about how Neil is totally going to hold you when the twilight falls. It even goes instrumental for an absurd amount of time before Neil comes back in, requesting you not be sad because you're the best thing that he ever had. They're hardly challenging lyrics, but it's a sweet nostalgic love song with a very twangy electric guitar. And then BOOM, the song that originally got me into Neil Young when he performed it live at the MTV music awards, along with Pearl Jam. It's Keep On Rockin' In The Free World, and it's a screamer, a banger, a call to revolution, and a jam all-in-one. Listening to the original version, just causes me to sing the Eddie Vedder portions of the duet version. I bought a ton of Pearl Jam bootlegs in the 90s. For at least a couple of years, I thought Fuckin' Up was a lesser Pearl Jam B-side. I like it, mostly for nostalgic reasons, but I've always considered it a kind of whiny, self-reflective song, which is TOTALLY 90s alt rock. This continues the driving guitars of the previous track, with some excessive wammy work. It's exactly the kind of song an angry teenager would shout along with when their mom took away their computer privileges for something they absolutely knew they shouldn't have been doing. It, naturally, ends with an excessive amount of reverb. TAKE THAT, MOM!!!! We return to acoustic folk rock land with Hanging On A Limb. This is another track that you could easily convince me came out in the mid-70s AM radio boom. Particularly because it's a duet with Linda Ronstadt. It's a political lullaby. It could easily have been the final track of this album. From Linda Ronstadt to the return of Crazy Horse, Neil Young draws his 70s past into his 80s and early 90s work. Too Lonely sounds less nostalgic than the other tracks, and works as a very simplistic rock anthem. Because Neil spent the 80s doing his avant-pop synth work, he didn't do the weird 80s transition rock that happened. The slightly crunchier arena rock style guitars with cleaner lead vocals but background vocal arrangements that hadn't yet powerwashed the stink of the 70s off them. Mansion On The Hill is as close as he comes. It's one of those self-reflective songs where a guy who got rich off of art realizes he's no longer the underdog, he's The Man! But it's not very specific and stays just distant enough from the self-reflection that you can focus on the guitars and not think This Is So Whiny because, miraculously, it isn't whiny at all. Don't Cry should be from an 80s soundtrack. The protagonist is getting his shit together. He realizes he treated his lover bad and he's helping her leave him. He was never abusive, he just kind of sucked. But he could get better. But he knows it's not her job to stick with him while he gets better. His guitar riffs vacillate between grunge crunch and new wave noodling. I feel like Pearl jam is ust waiting for Neil to pass before they cover this song as well. It's right in their wheelhouse. The previous epically long tracks on this album have been soft AM whispers with great beats and instrumentation. Love And Only Love starts with a minute and a half of This Is Definitely A Rock Song before the vocals kick in. At over twelve minutes ,I expected this to do more than just verse breakdown chorus bridge instrumental verse breakdown chorus bridge instrumental etc, but the guitat jams between bridges and the verses are so catchy, I don't mind that it's twelve minutes that never break form. The transition to No More, a similarly toned but half the length jam was so seamless that I didn't notice it took place. It's really an echo of the previous track. I don't mean that disparagingly. The Long Walk Home could be the last track on any previous Neil Young album. Harmonica, sweeping near-falsetto, complicated relationship with America, synth rise, wait ... gun sound effects? Ok, so it quickly veers from classic Young ballads, but then it settles back.The guns are a bit much. Using the drums instead would have been just as powerful, and not removed me from the song. I still like this as a closer, particularly when the harmonica wafts back in. Also, the song doesn't overstay its welcome, getting out in about five minutes. While I'm not one of the White Folks Who Think Rap Peaked In The 90s from the title of this post, I'm not an expert on rap. Apart from The Chronic and Doggystyle, which I must have listened to hundreds of times in their entirety, most of my knowledge of rap came from what was played on MTV or the radio. I was having a conversation with someone in the early 2000s about NWA, and said person remarked that I "seem(ed) pretty knowledgable about 80s and 90s rap but probably wasn't, actually." And they were completely correct. So I bought more albums and actually sat down and listened to them. It didn't make me a scholar on the subject, or even a knowledgable source. It made me a bigger fan. So I don't present this as some sort of Here Is A Historically Accurate Document About A Genre Of Music I Am An Officianado Of. This is a Hey, I Like This Artist And If You Want To Experience What I Enjoy From This Artist, Here's A List Of Songs I Like That I Think You Might Enjoy Too. And I've included some historical context but mainly context for why/how I, personally, approached it. If you like these songs, you should go buy the albums they're from, and check out the artists who've influenced the songs (I've included a majority of the artists sampled here). 1. If you came to rap in the early 90s, it was probably through Dr. Dre's The Chronic. The singles from that album were everywhere. MTV was like "Hey, we have moved on from the beatboxing pop and realize now that LL Cool J isn't exactly underground. Check out these songs." Dr. Dre was one of the best producers in any genre of music during the early 90s, and his samples and arrangements are inescapably catchy. And as such, his album ruled Billboard for eight months.
While not one of the singles from the album, Lil' Ghetto Boy, establishes early Snoop's style perfectly, and even drops the "Murder was the case that they gave me" line that became one of his most popular singles later on. And, yea, the second verse is Dre. But these two were inseperable in '91 to '93. This was the track that made me track down Donny Hathaway. If you're not familiar with his music, you should go check that out. There's also some gorgeous trilling flute over a Rodney Franklin riff. That's such a deeper sample cut than the James Brown's "Funky Drummer" sample that was so prevelant in the late 80s. 2. If you only know Snoop from his singles, here's the first song you might know the words to, and feel safe singing mostly along to. It's Gin & Juice from Snoop's solo debut, Doggystyle. There were certainly a ton of white boys where I was from singing "Rolling down the street, smoking indo, sipping on gin and juice" who not only didn't know what "indo" was, but also would gag on any cocktail of Tanqueray and juice. They also definitely had never busted a nut within a hundred yards of anything but their hand and box of tissues. Whether or not I fit into all of these categories, I can not remember. The samples on this track led me to George McCrae, who reminded me of Bill Withers who I only knew from "Ain't No Sunshine" until getting McCrae's album inspired me to get Withers's Greatest Hits. I did not catch on to Slave until I heard their song "Walking down the street watching ladies watching you." in a store, and was like "Dafuck? Who is this? I need this album." 3. Gz and Hustlas is the first full on braggadocio on this mix. I blow up your mouth like I was Dizzy Gillespie is far and away the best line. But this track is all about Snoop's rhythmic delivery over that Bernard Wright track. Also, the debut of Bow Wow on the intro. This could have easily been the fourth single from Doggystyle. 4. I don't know anyone who was listening to music in 1993 who didn't at least know the chorus to Who Am I? (What's My Name?) even if they didn't know the title of the song. It was omnipresent in pop culture. Your whitest of white and out of touchiest teacher knew Snoop's stage name at this point. This is also the first track where Snoop completely outclasses the song he's homaging. George is, by far, my favorite Clinton. I've seen him live twice. "Atomic Dog" is nowhere near my favorite track he's worked on, even though it is incredibly catchy. Snoop elevated The Hell out of it here. ("Give Up The Funk", the other Clinton song sampled is A Classic, and if you haven't heard it before, I question if you've ever been outisde your house or consumed any sort of media.) It's tough to recognize The Counts sample by casually listening to this song, but I highly recommend them if you need some instrumental funk tracks to listen to in the background while you're trying to be creative. 5. I'm not going to make a "going to the dogs reference", but Snoop's post-Doggystyle career wasn't so glamorous for the rest of the 90s. Disputes with Death Row Records led to some unauthorized album releases by Suge Knight and they included some tracks that Snoop probably wasn't so proud of. So for his second release on No Limit records, he went back to work with Dr. Dre. It's still not at the level of The Chronic or Doggystyle, but No Limit Topp Dogg has a few head boppable tracks. Snoopafella is practically a cover of Dana Dane's "Cinderfella". Aparr from some updated references, the song's journey, chorus, and beat are nearly identical. But in 1999, I'd never heard of Dana Dane, so this song about being a male Cinderella sounded new and interesting to me. 6. If you have a friend who still uses the suffixes "-izzle" "-iznit", please slap them once across the face and tell them to stop. Even Snoop, who is responsible for bringing that vernacular into pop culture stopped doing it two decades ago. The Shiznit is mostly recycling lines and concepts from The Chronic and the hits from Doggystyle (the album "The Shiznit" is from). But it works for me. Probably because it's more George Clinton samply. Here, it's "Flashlight", another song that I feel has permeated pop culture enough that most everyone has heard it, even if they don't know what it's called or who it's by. But as a child of the late 80s, the sampe of Billy Joel's "The Stranger" is probably what grabbed me, even though I definitely wouldn't have been able to identify it the first few dozen times I heard it. There's also a sample from Sons Of Champlin's "You Can Fly", a band I still need to better familairize myself with. 7. Lodi Dodi led me to check out Slick Rick, who is not my favorite rapper, despite his incredible influence over the genre. I much prefer Snoop's version of the song, though it would be great if there was some Doug E Fresh on it. There is no way to honestly listen to Snoop's output without getting a ton of misogyny. I've tried to steer around it as much as possible. But you can't experience 90s Snoop without "bitches and hoes" and women as objects. He was 19 when his rap career took off, and 19 year olds in the early 90s weren't bastions of progressiveness. You'll find a lot less of this as the discography evolves into the 21st century. I note it here (this is hardly the first song on this fictional album that has a problematic view of women) because I briefly mentioned that Slick Rick not being my favorite rapper. For Snoop, his misogyny was part of his image. As were his 90s gangsta persona, his relationship to violence and murder, and his celebration of the tamest illegal drug in America. My only experiences with Slick Rick songs center around how women need to satisfy him. It was his entire image. I don't care if he's considered The First Real Storyteller In Rap. It gets real old, real fast. It got old when I was 18 and experiencing his music for the first time, and it certainly didn't age well since then. Snoop's lyrics haven't really aged well, either, but there was enough different subject matter to them that they didn't seem abhorrent to me in 1992/93 etc. I was also not a bastion of progressiveness. 8. This might be the only song on this album that wasn't one that I started listening to when it was fresh. I bought Doggfather but I didn't really love any of the tracks besides "Snoop's Upside Your Head". The background vocals and production on the title track speak to me much more than Snoop's vocals here. 9. I always forget that Murder Was The Case is from Doggystyle. I remember the video being released a good deal later than the singles from the album (this is a false memory), and it had its own soundtrack album. This was 100% the song where I stopped thinking of Snoop as The Featured Performer From The Chronic. He performed this live at the 1993 MTV video awards, and it, along with Neil Young & Pearl Jam's "Keep On Rockin' In The Free World" was the highlight. Given that the rest of the performers were U2, Janet Jackson, REM, Soul Asylum, Lenny Kravitz, and The Spin Doctors, all artists who I had been listening to obsessively, he had to Fucken Bring It to even get my attention, and he ended up surpassing just about all of my favorites. The massive sample in this song is from Santana's "Fried Neckbones And Home Fries", and once again, Snoop has elevated this kind of quiry 70s AM album track and elevated it into something beyond its seeming potential. 10. I already mentioned that Snoop's Upside Your Head was my favorite track off Doggfather when it came out. It is the first song that you can identify as narratively taking place after Doggystyle, as he references Suge Knight as a criminal (the bad kind, not the fun gangsta kind). This is another update of a song that's nearly a cover, as it's entirely dependent on The Gap Band's "Oops Upside Your Head" the way The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" is entirely dependent on Andrew Loog Oldham's cover of The Rolling Stones' "The Last Time". 11. We close out this first album from Snoop with Slow Down. This is another song where the background vocals and production really make it for me. Snoop's vocals are great, but it's got an 80s R&B ballad single feel that I imagine being used for a montage in a gritty drama from 87 or 88, which makes sense as Loose Ends released the original version of "Slow Down" in 1986 Working in comic book stores has been both a blessing and a curse for me in this millenium, as I have amassed an increidbly large library of graphic novels and knowledge about the industry. In the 90s, I worked in record stores and had the same issue but with CDs and opinions. As a completist, both jobs fed into my craving for complete understanding of a band/series/author/artist. I was in high school when Counterparts came out. I loved the first track, and thought the album was pretty good. And the next time I went down to the trendy CD store in Greenfield, MA, I picked up Roll The Bones, and then I just kept getting one album every time I went into town until I owned All Of Them. But it didn't stop there. In college, I briefly worked with a progressive rock band who asked me to join them because of two things 1.) I had a massive CD collection that included all of Rush and Dream Theater's output. and 2.) When they asked me to name progressive rock bands, I mentioned early Genesis, causing the drummer to shout "SOMEBODY ELSE GETS IT." which, um, sort of? We didn't make it to our first show. I bought their three 21st century albums when their comic series, Clockwork Angels came out. I neither listened to the albums nor read the comics. I hadn't had an urge to listen to Rush since college. I didn't even plan on doing a discography for them because, hoo-boy, what do you say about a band that had 40 years of songs, a legendary reputation, but who very few people outside of college ever have the desire to listen to? Then I saw the video of the marching band who performed a Rush Medley at some football game and I thought "How visually cool, and musically boring. How is it that all marching band music just sounds like the same eternal song, no matter the source material?" Rush deserves better. So here is a One Album Discography of Rush, despite their tremendous output because, oooof, so many of their songs are long and pretentious. And who wants to listen to Ayn Rand put to music? I mean even the Tolkien put to music is excruciating, and I like Tolkien. Please listen to the album reponsibly. 1. It's Rush, so I feel like to properly prepare you for the experience, I can't just throw down one of their hits. Instead, you get the heavily instrumental (there is narration and the occasional verse) and incredibly long Tolkienesque The Necromancer. It's over 12 minutes of progressive rock from the 1970s that flirts with the ideas of Heavy Metal but never really commits. The different sections of the song are broken up by pitched down narration. The second section, which kicks in with drums before getting as Heavy as early Rush really gets (think really slow early Metallica with Led Zeppelinesque vocals), is probably the most satisfying part of the song. But it's all good if you're in the mood for this kind of music. Just frenetic in its pace changes.
2. The first excellent riff of this album belongs to The Spirit Of The Radio. This song just throws everything at you right from the get-go. It's like three different great openings in a row. The lyrics are rarely the highlights of early Rush songs, and this is no exception. But it sounds like the kind of track you occasionally hear on a Classic Rock radio or streaming station and think "Do I know this song? I swear I've heard these riffs before." 3. One of the four Rush songs whose lyrics I've ever really remembered is Their Biggest Hit, Tom Sawyer. If you've only ever heard one Rush song, it was almost definitely this one. Again, a great riff, and again complex and noticably awesome drumming. It's got that whole sci-fi synthsound that places in the early 80s but the lyrics are pretty timeless. This is one of three songs that gets stuck in my head whenver I think of Rush. 4. I don't think Losing It shows up on many people's Favorite Rush Songs list, but it's a great example of their ballady synth work. It has a sweet narrative that's neither Tolkienesque nor Randish, and Geddy Lee's vocals are softer here than on any of the previous tracks on this album. If the guitars were a bit softer, it could fit into that Air Supply Early 80s Soft Alternative Rock. 5. Ok, here is the monster. Clocking in at over twenty minutes long, 2112 was the song and album that really drew the music nerds to Rush. It's so 1970s spacey. It's so epically long. It's so many parts. The whole album is the best example of Rush telling a single story on an album. And while it's never been my favorite Rush album, I get why it is Many Fans' favorite Rush album. This is definitely a Strap In Song. If you wash your hands the length of this song instead of "Happy Birthday", they'll be pruney and will smell like soap for Hours. I think it's four minutes before the vocals even kick in. You'll need a candy cigarette after this one. 6. To balance it out, we have the short and somewhat sweet The Trees, which is a very folklorey song about different types of trees that accelerates as it goes on. I say it's short, but that's really just compared to the other songs on this album. It's still over four minutes. 7. The Most 80s Radio Friendly Song, in my opinion, is Subdivisions. This could almost be Journey or Foreigner with Geddy Lee on vocals. The synths are much catchier here than on most tracks. It's also the apex of their Conformity Is Bad, Fight The Power songs. It doesn't sound rebellious musically, but the lyrics are very Of That Genre And Era. 8. The second Hey I Know All The Words To This Song is the first Rush song I ever heard, Closer To The Heart. It was on a friend's mix called "Windowsills", which contained songs they liked to listen to while sitting on their ... windowsills ... contemplating the universe. It's a light, bass-centric ballad with bells. You can see it as a bit of a template for the more eccentric but mainstream grunge bands like Screaming Trees and Alice In Chains. It 100% sounds like a Mother Love Bone song. 9. Where's My Thing is the fourth part of a trilogy of songs. How Douglas Adamesque, right? It's completely instrumental, and funky as Hell. I wish there were more Rush songs like this, but with lyrics. It's a blend of 80s arena metal and funk that I just don't remember hearing from anyone else. 10. As I was collecting the Rush albums, Test For Echo came out, and I loved the title track. I falsely remembered how it went for years, though, and listening to it this time through I still love it, but it sounded completely different from the version that occasionally rattled around my head for the last twenty years. 11. Tears is another ballad, this one almost acoustic, that I don't see on any of their retrospective hit albums. It just sounds like a familiar singer/songwriter with a guitar from the early late twentieth century. It's a great break from the relentlessness of most of Rush's work while still definitely being Geddy Lee. Also, flutes and violins? Ok. 12. Another early Rush hit was Fly By Night. I didn't remember this one at all when I was doing my listen-throughs. Each time it came up I thought "I like this Very 70s radio friendly classic rock song. Why don't I remember listening to it before?" It's chorus is just slightly different from the way they usually approached songwriting in the 1970s that it catches me pleasantly by surprise. 13. Red Sector A is very early 80s U2ish with its jangly and echoey guitars, so of course I gravitate towards it. It has an almost "Eye Of The Tiger" bassline in the background, and it definitely gets Rushier as it goes on, but that beginning is straight up all the early 1980s bands that I started to like in the early 90s. 14. I have never understood how Neurotica wasn't one of Rush's greatest hits. They didn't even release it as a single, but it's one of those Four Songs I mentioned earlier that I remember most of the lyrics to. I suppose that's one of the benefits of rarely hearing a band on the radio but owning their albums is that you really do end up knowing that you like a song because it affects you, and not just because you're bombarded by it in public. 15. The Body Electric is another jangly early 80s track. I liked it when I thought it was just a catchy song with a binary chorus. But it's based on a Twilight Zone episode by Ray Bradbury which, in turn, is based on a line by Walt Whitman. So it was pretty much designed for my enjoyment. 16. The fourth song that has stuck with me during the vast years when I don't listen to Rush is Animate. This one was a single, and I get it. It's got the riffs, the easy to remember lyrics that sound like a bunch of platitudes in a love song lacking a narrative. And the breakdown, where they namedrop the album name (Counterparts) comes out of nowhere and then tosses you back to the original melody. 17. Territories flows out of the end of "Animate", with its almost Paul Simon rhythm guitar licks. Because of Gddy Lee's unique voice, it's instantly recognizable as Rush. Otherwise, this would be a real outlier song. 18. Closing out the album is a quiet Tolkienesque ballad, Different Strings. I imagine it as a love song from Frodo to Sam at the end of their journey. It's an appropriately ridiculous way to end a Rush album that doesn't contain a focused narrative. Every year, more and more people on my various social media feeds post links to the Mountain Goats' "This Year". Some of them have never heard another Mountain Goats song, some of them have every album (even the cassettes) that John Darnielle ever even contemplated recording. I'm not at all an expert on the band. I have dated and lived with a variety of people who played their songs since the late 90s. I have enjoyed the music, dismissed the music, been frustrated by songs put on repeat, and occasionally wished for an alternate universe where The Mountain Goats didn't exist (through no fault of the actual band). 2020 was the year a series of communities were forced to move from in-person to online, and that included a poetry community I'm a part of. Every week we do a themed event where people might write about birds, water, wearing a bunny suit, their personal hells, whatever mood strikes the sadistic organizer (who is me). About 1/3rd of the weeks, someone submits a poem that references The Mountain Goats. It's not always the same person, either. Some of the rest of the group scratches their facial hair and says something akin to "I guess I'll have to look up these Mountainous Sheep" (many in the group are comfortably unhip) "and give their music a listen." Well, here you are ye ancient poets. A primer discography for The Mountain Goats. Their actual output is stunningly dense with more songs that anyone should have to listen to in a year. I've cut and pasted their EPs and their full albums together, leaving almost no corner of their output untouched. The exception? The cassette albums. Ispent a majority of the mid to late nineties messing around with other peoples' four or eight track recorders trying to help them edit their concept album about cars or their whiney, accidentally misogynist songs about how nobody loved them. The unprofessional lofi hiss (there are some that rise to professional levels) just brings back too many boring memories, so I just can't endure the cassette output. But I am combing through everything else. We're going to start with the lowest-fidelity I can handle. The early EPs leading up to their first full-length adventure: Zopilote Machine, as well as tracks from said album. It's one of the shorter albums I've ever done for one of these discographies, but 1.) The early Mountain Goats songs tend to blend together and cause me to lose interest after a while, and 2.) It feels wrong to make this longer. Tape is expensive! Everybody ready? Sinaloan Milk Snake Song pretty much encapsulates the early sound of The Mountain Goats for me. Strummy guitar, a seemingly stream of consciousness set of lyrics, nasally lead vocals. It's musically upbeat (partially due to the background vocals from The Casual Girls and the la la la la la la la la refrains) while the lyrics are fairly downerish. It's a contrast that seems inherent in almost all of Darnielle's music. It just *sounds* like everything is going to be okay, even as he sings about how awful everything is.
We have a staticy interlude before the percussive guitar moves in for the near-Christmas song (holly and mistletoe?), Night Of The Mules. Clip-clop clip-clop. I bury the hum from the beginning of Pure Honey beneath the percussion of the previous track. I just enjoyed the way they flowed together. Like many of the songs on this mix, the track clocks in at under two minutes. It's just this weird little misdirect song, where you think it's going to have some sort of existential meaning, but it just plops in a random phrase and stops. They have a more famous version of this trick called "Monkey Song" but I much prefer this song, as the lyrics end almost as soon as it reaches the weirdness, and it just repeats the song instrumentally. Azo The Nelli In Tlalticpac is quite the mouthful. And it sounds like pretty much every track where one dude plays a guiatar and sings a serious and repetitive song into a four track recorder. I'm not sure I'd like this song if it weren't so lo-fi. The lyrics are fine. The guitar is adequate. It just seems to be one of the prime listenable examples of this kind of recording. Drum machines and keyboards? On this album? Yeup. If Song For Tura Santana wasn't recorded in a basement or a windowless one-room studio apartment, then it is a musical crime. It's so basic. Then beneath the basic fade out, Barbara Streisand gets all melodramatic, and then Quetzacoatl Is Born rises in nasally, strumming glory. It makes me want to break out the Saddle Creek catalogue, put on an unnecessary winter hat, and smoke some American Spirits. Into the fire you go! We Have Seen The Enemy is one of those lovely Dude Talks Over Guitar Until Oh Shit! He's Singing Now Because This Is A Song. It's a trope I often enjoy, and this track is no exception. I also like that you get One Verse of the song, and then it's over. On Tuesday nights for a few years, a few friends and writers would meet up for drinks at a bar called Grendel's Den. It's pretty much my only positive association with the Beowulf villain, apart from Grendel's Mother, which at least one of my former roommates used to sit in his bedroom and play for hours at a time. Going To Lebanon seems like a musical continuation of the previous track. Like Grendel's mom has nowhere to run to / nowhere to go except Lebanon. And why not? We also have the return of The Casual Girls, who aren't always on-pitch, or even well-harmonized, and yet I enjoy them every time they show up in this discography. I guess Lebanon didn't work out for the narrator beause now he's Going To Maryland, and he didn't even take The Casual Girls with him! He's just focused on water. Which, ok. Why not? Another song that bubbles in under the previous track is Pure Love which is a lovely keyboard-belltone song about how someone plots to steal the narrator's heart, even though he never mentions his heart or does more than hint that a crime has been committed. Also, it won't be necessary. He keeps telling you that. The Mountain Goats has a series of songs from 1991-1995 called "Standard Bitter Love Song"s. They're fine. But my favorite bitter love song of his is Orange Ball Of Hate, which is also a counterpart to "Orange Ball Of Love", which is a fine song, but didn't quite make the cut for me, even though it would have been a neat callback. Pure Heat keeps mentioning the weather from the last track. We're nearing the end of this very short album, and this feels like just the track to tow us there. In fact, here we are at the end, and, what's that? We have another journey to take? Ok, I guess we're Going To Georgia. This song just sounds like something twenty-somethings in the mid-nineties would yell loudly along with the band. The club was way past capacity because the fire codes wouldn't be taken seriously for another five or six years. The club reeks of cheap cigarettes, sweat, and probably a bit of patchouli. The bartenders are pissed because there is almost nobody over twenty at this show. And then the song stops, and the kids cheer, but they don't Go anywhere (not even Georgia or Maryland or Lebanon) because there's nothing else to do in this town but go to small indie shows and talk about leaving. "If I don't make it," the audience thinks, "I hope this band does." The Neil Young Discography Reimagined 3: Musically Uncharacteristic Of His Previous Recordings11/23/2020 As I've previously mentioned, I'm not a Neil Young expert. I'm coming to this discography from ap lace of ignorance. I know those influenced by him more than I know why he influenced them. Yes, I'm familiar with his 70s hits, and his 90s resurgence but I had no idea who he was in the 80s. There's a reason. Neil Young went through some shit in the 80s. He was given a contract with "complete artistic freedom" and he took advantage of that. And his albums tanked. Most of them aren't awful, they just aren't traditional Neil Young albums. It's like if U2 went direct from Joshua Tree to Zooropa. It's jarring. So jarring that his label tried to sue him for breach of contract, claiming his 80s output was "musically uncharacteristic of (his) previous albums". They lost. They even apologized for the lawsuit, after the fact. The albums that make up this reimagined album are Re-ac-tor, Trans, Everybody's Rockin', and Landing On Water. Apart from Everybody's Rockin', none of them are bad albums. They're just neither excellent, nor Neil Youngish. But they're creative, and each of them has at least a couple of good songs. Everybody's Rockin' has one fun song and one good song, but its Hey Remember The 50s Rockabilly Sound was stale forty years ago, and hasn't aged any better. But there's something charming about the combination of these styles into one eclectic, hard to pin down album. It's definitely the 80s in NeilYoungland. Check out the synth beats on People On The Street. This ain't your guitar strumming champion of the people. Oh, wait, here comes that reedy voice, and he is trying to get you to help the homeless. Ok, so this is the familiar Neil Young, and while this is the band Crazy Horse, which have played with him before, they sure do sound different. The background vocals on the chorus sound very soft rock/r&b 80s, though I couldn't name a band that they sound precisely like. We continue with the Computer Age sound. Though this song also has Young's guitar fingerprints alongside the synth chords. I can't decide if the main vocals on this track have been hit with a little echo but the background vocals have absolutely been vocoded to the stratosphere. Why is Neil Young suddenly on vocoder? According to Young, he was having trying to reconcile the fact that his son, who has cerebal palsy, couldn't speak, and so he was toying with making his own communication more complicated. Touch The Night hits us with some heavy guitar at the beginning before tossing in a boys' choir and synth. But then, there it is, the unmistakable Neil Young vocals that could have come from any point in his discography. This song follows the metaphoric trajectory of "Computer Age", as we've got a bunch of traffic and highways scattered throughout the lyrics of both songs. Apart from the synth touches, this absolutely could have come out of his late 70s output and not confused any of his fans, or his record label. That's also true of the next song, Ra-pid Tran-sit, which is all guitars. He pitches his voice a bit lower for some of the vocals, and includes a stutter to the beginning of each non-chorus line but it's, otherwise, classic Neil Young, and comes before the Geffen records debacle, but it fits nicely on this album. Most of the albums that Geffen records didn't like, I quite enjoy. They definitely aren't hits, and I prefer them as background music than albums that I'm going to give my full focus. The exception is 1983's Everybody's Rockin', which is, at its core, a terrible record. A nostalgic for the 1950s "rockabilly" album. I'm glad Young had fun recording it, and touring behind it, but it is a slog to listen to. Wonderin' is one of the two tracks on the album that I don't mind, as it really sounds more like a Neil Young song in the style of the 1950s, rather than Neil Young trying to recreate a 1950s sound. As an anomoly on this eclectic album, I think it's great. There's a nice little clanging bell that brings us back from the 1950s to the 1970s/80s guitar rock of Southern Pacific. The lyrics, about a rail worker being let go because of his advancing age, is vintage Young. Like An Inca is just enjoyable Neil Young guitar rock. He doesn't strain his voice up, the way he does on many of his tracks, which gives the song a much more relaxed vibe. Especially with the background vocals. Writing the descriptions of this album, has me realizing how much I do enjoy his more traditional work to the experimental phase. A majority of the songs on this Musically Uncharacteristic Of (His) Previous Albums, really aren't that uncharacteristic. They're musically satisfying, and include alterations to the 1960s/1970s Neil Young formula, but I don't find them all that jarring. I'm surprised more of them weren't hits for him. Ok, I know why Kinda Fonda Wanda, another of his 1950s style songs wasn't a hit, but it's a ridiculous and fun song. I've trimmed the second verse off because the lyrics are novelty-style and thematically repetetive, but I enjoy the core joke of the song. Young isn't often known for his sense of humor. But it's clearly there. This is also a nice breather, as it's about a minute and a half, while the previous song was nearly ten minutes long. Twiddly-dee! I Got A Problem gives us heavy guitars, and a drum beat that would make Phil Collins's heart flutter. This is another song about having problems communicating. Yet the song, itself, from lyrics to the limited instrumentation, is crystal clear in its meaning. The synth is back for Bad News Beat. So are generic love lyrics. But they're catchy, and very, very, very New Age 80s. You could definitely imagine this as a Cars song with Neil Young on vocals. It's not the same kind of fun as "Kinda Fonda Wonda" but it is light, and just sounds warm, like it could be in the background of a beach montage scene in an 80s action film. Right up until the breakdown, which is remarkably spare. You can hear Kraftwerk's fingerprints all over We R In Control. Young's conspiracy theorist's wet dream theme song. All the lyrics are vocoded. Instead of a beach scene, this is an all-night scene where you flash across a city stopping at the inordinate amount of sinister looking, suit and sunglassed government employees, spying on the general public with no moral qualms. We close out the album with a piano nostalgia song. Get Back On It is somewhere on the border of the Everybody's Rockin' album, and Young's 70s output. It does transition to an electric guitar ending, and will bring us into the next evolution of Young's music.
I was inspired to do a reimagined Tom Petty discography by the release of Wildflowers And All The Rest a few weeks ago. Wildflowers has consistently been my favorite Petty album since it came out. Before the new version of the album was released, my own personal mix had the original album, the two new cuts from Greatest Hits and "Walls" from the She's The One Soundtrack. Many of the cuts released from the new album are from the recording sessions for those two albums, as well as the original Wildflowers album. I had debated just making my versoin of Wildflowers and then tacking on a new album's worth of material, but (and it's a big but) the additional songs are great for enhancing the feel of the album, but I don't know how often I'd listen to just the non-album tracks, even if I attached them to the Greatest Hits and She's The One Soundrack songs. So I've integrated them into a double album, which is what Petty originally intended Wildflowers to be. Unlike most of my reimagined albums, this isn't relentless tracks that flow into each other and crossfade. Petty's music doesn't really lend itself to that. So, unlike the other albums, this you could just take this playlist, listen to it in the same order, and your listening experience would be the same as mine. Embarrassing aside to start this off: I thought I finished this project a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot to upload the post before my computer shut down. No big deal. I came back to the project a few days later and it didn't feel right, and I couldn't put my finger on it. I eventually gave up trying to figure out what was wrong, and appreciated the reimagined album. Then I realized, I think what's missing is the song that led me to buy the album. I mean, sure, I already loved Full Moon Fever and Into The Great Wide Open but I was also starting to expand my musical horizons, and was tossing away artists I'd loved in middle school. Billy Joel, gone. Michael Jackswho? I have no idea where those Mariah Carey CDs even came from. But then I saw the video for You Don't Know How It Feels, and there was something about that drum beat. The relaxed guitar solo near the end. The clearly stoned harmonica. And the other people in the dorm I lived in seemed to also like it. Petty was cool. Ok.
I was living in an all-boys dorm in high school, watching MTV when the video for Mary Jane's Last Dance came on. I wasn't the sort of music fan who bought a Greatest Hits album if I liked a band. I wanted the experience of their albums. But I figured I was going to have to have to buy this particular album if just for this song. That opening riff is one of Petty's absolute best.The background woo-ooo-ooohs are delicious icing on Petty's pot brownie. It's a perfect hint at what Wildflowers was to be, and just sounds crunchier and more fun than anything from Into The Great Wide Open. If there's a Tom Petty song that sounds like it could have been a part of The Beatles discography, it's Keep Crawling Back To You. It's vaguely orchestral sounding opening with extra flute. The piano's ascension and then camoflauge within the melody is not the sort of expected melding of instruments you get on a Heartbreakers album. I love it. The title track, Wildflowers is a happy-go-lucky song that sounds like it was written for a guitarist sitting by a campfire, trying to impress everyone with how cool and retro he is. It shouldn't work. It's pretty hokey. But it's also pretty, and the bounciness between verses just makes me want to smile and bop my head like a muppet. The first of the non-album tracks is There Goes Angela (Dream Away), a straight-forward narrative. It definitely has the breezy acoustic feel of many of the ballads from the original Wildflowers. Petty has a dreamy harmonica solo between verses. It's the sort of song I wouldn't want to hear in a stadium, but would love to hear in a private concert setting with less than fifty people. It's Good To Be King was one of the reasons that I bought this on cassette. I already owned the album on CD but I was staying with my grandparents for a week or so, and I had record/cassette deck there to transfer my favorite musicals from their collection but no CD player. From the opening piano chords to the haunting background oooooohs and the Hammond organ barely audible during the transition from bridge to chorus. Plus the sincerely delivered lyrics about how great rock stardom is are so hilariously self-effacing. I doubt I picked up on that the first fifty or so times I listened to this, being in the prime of teenage angst as I was. It also has a killer string outro. How many millions of pop singers and folk singers and rock and roll lyricists have made a song about being sad that includes "the rain". So. So. So so many. There's A Break In The Rain embraces its triteness. Yea, it's another acoustic ballad, this one reprising a lyric from "You Don't Know How It Feels". (This is actually how I realized that I had somehow forgotten the opening track to this disc.) There's an impassioned piano chord jamming throughout Hungup And Overdue. A halfhearted guitar strums over it. The lyrics float breezily over the song. This is somewhere between The Beatles and The Hives for Lazy Rock. It sounds great, but it sounds effortless, and I don't mean Effortlessly Genius, I mean it sounds like people just happened to be playing instruments and singing these songs when there as a microphone and a sound engineer around. In no way does the song blow my mind, but I like it. It's an open window threatening to scatter papers but never following through. At one of my previous jobs, we had The Last CD player. Oh, I'm sure they're still making a small amount of CD players somewhere in the world. But in a few hundred years after we've blown ourselves to smithereens, an alien race will find some CD players and try to recreate them. They'll be sort of successful but it will be all kinds of quirky, and they'll get so angry that they'll zap it back into the past, where my boss, in the mid-90s will find it and bring it into the store. It will mainly be used to play James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, and some fantastic funk records. But one day, I will show up, and I'll start making mixes of my favorite songs. I'll give the albums goofy names. And the first track on the first album of family friendly rock and R&B will be Honey Bee by Tom Petty. I know this because, of course, it's already happened. Time travel is complex, yo. This song is pure silly fuzzy blues riff. It sounds more bumble bee than honey bee to me. But what do I know? "Honey Bee" fades out directly into Climb That Hill, a rarity for this album. This is an inspirational song with a beat and a basic guitar scale exercise that makes me forget the inspiration. Like, okay Tom, we didn't back down already, what else do you want from us? That hill doesn't even look that tall, I'm just not into climbing this morning. Back in high school again, and my junior year, we were all trying to figure out what Beck was singing in "Loser" because none of our dumb asses spoke Spanish. We loved the song, and some of us went back and bought the two previous Beck albums and were Very Confused. It wasn't electric now music, it was folky indie rock. For the most part, I couldn't get into it, but I did love Asshole. So when I put in the She's The One Soundtrack, and realized that Petty was covering the song, I smiled. He really doesn't do anything exceptionally exciting about it. It definitely sounds like he got stoned and thought "What if I covered this song, but, like, added some piano to it. Would that be funny? Oh shit, I think I'm supposed to turn in that sountrack album, uhhh, I'm short a few tracks. Should I? Hmmm. Hehehe. Yeeea. I'm so subversive." The most surprising thing about It's Only A Broken Heart is that it took Petty twenty years to write and release it. It's the gentlest of the gentle ballads on this album. You can definitely hear George Harrison on the song. I mean, he's not actually involved in it, other than his incredible influence on this phase of Petty's career. It's gorgeous. I believe "lilting" would probably show up in a professional's review. Spare use of piano. Wire brush on the drums. Acoustic guitar solo that sounds like it came off of Eric Clapton's Unplugged. It was made for soft rock radio. Walls, on the other hand, crashes out of the She's The One Soundtrack. I adore this song. It's in my top ten Petty songs. Probably much higher than it should be. I love 50s style background woahs, I love the really stupid lyrics. It's the most Mad Hatter Petty since "Don't Come Around Here No More". The picadilly resurgence at the end is gorgeous and unexpected. More expected is the sad, introspective breakup ballad, Hard On Me. Like the best Petty songs, it's catchy as all hell, even though it's not doing anything terribly original, and isn't as great as the other songs on the album, but it's still so damned catchy. Closing off the first side is another non-album acoustic ballad. Harry Green, a rare narrative song about someone who isn't one of Petty's exes. It comes to a perfect dwindling close to taper off Disc One. Tom Petty's follow-up to Full Moon Fever, Into The Great Wide Open, was one of the last cassette tapes I bought, and I played it until it sounded warped. I loved it. I learned all the lyrics. Because I had bought it when it was new, as opposed to When I Heard It An Adult's House, it felt more like My Tom Petty Album than Full Moon Fever. But after the back to back releases of Greatest Hits and Wildflowers, I hardly ever went back to it. It's a solid album, but, looking back through all of Petty's discography, it does feel like a really Safe version of Full Moon Fever. There are no weird tracks on this album, they all sound like radio friendly single attempts. I love the title track, and a few other songs, but it's not as magic. I didn't cut anything, though, because there aren't any Bad Songs. I even added the final Traveling Wilburys track for this discography. And, with its new order, I like it a bit better as I've tried my best to space out the songs that sounded too similar. As an album, I think it's more solid than my Southern Accents (which, again, is a pre-Full Moon Fever Greatest Hits collection) but I'd file it with 21st century Petty, albums I love from beginning to end, but am rarely compelled to listen to. Much like the frequently mentioned, Full Moon Fever, this album was formatted to highlight the singles. The first two tracks were the first two singles. They're good songs. They're not really openers, though. Makin' Some Noise is a declaration (that the rest of the album doesn't live up to) that this is going to be more rock than adult contemporary. The lyrics are completely forgettable. It's all about the guitar riff and the occasional Petty screech. It also follows the trend of laying down some interesting rockabilly piano that it fades out on far too quickly.
Into The Great Wide Open was the first Petty single that I was into at the same time that it was getting major radio play. I love its narrative flow, and the open strumming before the chorus hits. The final verse flow from jingle to mingle to single is probably my favorite verse he ever wrote. I love that the story ends there. It's time to say goodbye to the Traveling Wilburys with The Devil's Been Busy, a takedown of rich, entitled White people (which is probably not quite how they would have described it in 1990, but that is what it's about). It's not their greatest track, but I do love the chorus and the unmistakable George Harrison sitar. Another actual rock riff screams out of All Or Nothin', which sees raw Petty emerge in the chorus breaking up Mature Petty's verses. My skin is thicker / my heart is tougher / I don't mind working / but I'm scared to suffer has always seemed super relatable to me, even if it is Incredibly Trite. There's also hella wammy bar in the solo. Too Good To Be True is the quintissential sound of this album. It's very strummy. The background harmonies are very basic but work well. The lyrics are bumper sticker philosophy (as are the lyrics in "All Or Nothin'"). It's a good song, in that it seems like a song you already know all the words to. Even the fake ending before the almost soft jazz electric guitars seem like Oh Yea, I Remember This. Continuing the trend of the strummy familiar songs is For All The Wrong Reasons. The lyrics are a step up from the previous two, even if I wouldn't exactly call it challenging. It's the kind of song that if you heard it at a concert, you wouldn't feel bad about singing along with it, as everyone at the show likes it, but nobody was super psyched and waiting for This Song to experience live. King's Highway is almost a Cars song with Tom Petty on vocals. I think it's the drums that just scream Early 80s, even though this is an early 90s song. Part of me thought about plucking this song off this album and dropping it on to Highway Companion, it would have sounded instrumentally out of place, but lyrically perfect. My favorite part of the entire song is the exhausted drum finale. For the second album in a row, I've pulled the first track, also the first single out of its place because it didn't sound like an opener, and placed it where I felt it naturally belonged. Both times, I've ended up placing it at what would be the first track of Side Two for records or tapes. Learning To Fly is a perfectly great Tom Petty song. But I loved it So Much when it came out, and now I wouldn't put it in my top twenty-five Petty songs. Out In The Cold attempts to bring back the rock a bit. The drums do most of the work. Though the lower octaved guitars help give it a more menacing feel than most of the tracks on this album. It also has a spare narrative that evokes all sorts of Feeling Lost Because I Don't Know Where I'm At In My Relationship, even though it never really addresses that that's what's happening. I spent more time than should have been necessary to find a logical place for You And I Will Meet Again. Its opening strum sounds like it's already the middle of a song but not in such a way that I wanted to try and fade into it. Instead I placed the "What's In Here? / Ohhhh" skit just before it. I like the idea of the Petty that was wondering around in the snow during the last poem, opening a door and a monster...not just any monster but a big, fuzzy Muppet monster that represented his failed relationship...begins singing him this song. For the fourth or fifth time in the discography we fade out on rockabilly piano that I wish was more present in the song. The Dark Of The Sun could have been the closing track of the album. It's low-key but not quite a ballad, and there's a hint of optimism in the lyrics. I think I liked Two Gunslingers so much when it came out because I was reading The Waste Land by Stephen King at the time. And I always pictured the A stranger / told his missus / that's the last one / of these gunfights / you're ever going to drag me to taking place in Lud. Closing out the album is the actual closer from Into The Great Wide Open. Built To Last is a literal banger, if the bass drum is to be believed. It's a cheesy love song with some cool background effects, 50s harmonies, and it's a nice farewell to this familiar Petty, as the next album brings the last Interesting Change to Petty's repertoire. If you are not a diehard Tom Petty fan (and I'm not, I fall somewhere between casual and formal fandom) than you usually skip a bunch of tracks on Petty albums, and just listen to your favorites. With two exceptions: Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers. The new release of the updated Wildflowers is the reason I'm doing this discography now, but that doesn't detract from the joy of toying with Full Moon Fever. I have not removed any songs, and have, in fact, added a couple of Travelling Wilburys songs to it. The original album was mostly designed to showcasr singles. It starts hella strong and slowly fades in quality until the Obvious Closer for the album, and then it comes back and smacks you with the weirdest song on the album. I appreciate that method, but have aimed for a more cohesive album, letting the singles pop up occasionally rather than throwing them all at you at once. I don't care if it's sacrilege not to start with those five breezy strums that signal the opening of "Free Fallin'". This album has several songs that serve as great openers. For my money, I love the folk silliness of Yer So Bad. It's a signal that this album isn't like any previous Petty album. The production is cleaner. The jangle is still present but no longer the focus of songs. Jeff Lynne (the guy from ELO, and a fellow Traveling Wilbury) has pushed Petty's vocals to the front, and the whole album is better for it. Instead of rebellious Southern Rock with a screeching Petty, this is going to be a bright, shiny, happy Petty. It's a joy to listen to.
The first single comes crashing through with an incredible riffy opening. Runnin' Down A Dream is such a summer song, perhaps the second most summer song on this Very summer album. I love how they fade the rhythm guitars to the front for the silly strumming, and then push it back to the background. The woo-ooohs that swallow the ending of the song, as the sinister guitar riff is subdued by a Mike Campbell solo is also a new and welcome addition for a Heartbreakers song (it's true that this is Petty's first "solo" album, but many of the Heartbreakers and The Traveling Wilburys play on it). This is silly. "Runnin' Down A Dream" was the final song from Side A of the original cassette, and Petty does a little skit about it being the end of Side A. I like keeping it at the end of the second track. Just because it's fun, and because it makes the fact that the next song, End Of The Line, starts with Roy Orbison vocals before Petty joins in. Yeup, it's a Traveling Wilburys song. Still summery. I just see the sun coming down while people do watersports (like kayaking and diving into a lake, pervs). We slow things down a bit with A Face In The Crowd. I think it's a mandolin that strums throughout the song that helps this song stand out. It's only the second excellent ballad Petty has recorded (after "Southern Accents"). Fading in at the end of the previous track is a Very 80s synth beat that's soon overwhelmed by Very Tom Petty drums and guitars. Love Is A Long Road is the first track that would have fit on an early Petty album. Its production may be cleaner but it's a classic Petty song, and it's hard not to imagine this is just a really good regular Heartbreaker track. It has more of a late 70s than a late 80s feel, apart from those synths. Lord, those synths. Zombie Zoo is such a ridiculous Petty song. The brief piano riffs. The floating background vocals (which include Roy Orbison). The lyrics you shaved off all your hair / you look like Boris Karloff / and you don't even care. The chorus uses the phrase painted in the corner and, for reasons I can't explain, it always finishes in my head with like you was Pointdexter from Young MC's "Bust A Move", which came out the same year. I don't know why I've always had this association. Another light, fun song is Cool Dry Place, a Traveling Wilburys song with Petty completely at the forefront. Unlike the previous Wilbury tracks, this one keeps the other Wilburys in the background, rather than have them trade verses. So it really does sound like a Petty song. But with Orbinson, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Jeff Lynne as background singers. There's also a great low sax croaking, and some horn ribbits rounding out the bright instrumentation. After a breath of silence, it finally comes in. Free Fallin'. I enjoy it as a change of pace, rather than the intro. I think it gives the song more weight on the album. Although, if this were a cassette or record, this would come at exactly the beginning of Side B. I also want a cooldown after "Free Fallin'". The original album followed it up with "I Won't Back Down". I prefer putting The Apartment Song here. It's a solid song. A less weird "Yer So Bad" with more of a 1970s Heartbreakers vibe. And it has a great drum breakdown in the middle for a Southern Rock jam. I actualy wish there was more of the rockabilly piano before the song faded out. Twanging out of the piano is A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own. Another strange set of lyrics (where on Earth does I slept in your treehouse / my middle name of Earl come from in this song?) but a more radio-friendly instrumentation. I like the slide guitar twang, and the weird rising background vocals that don't actually go anywhere after the false stop. I Won't Back Down is the obvious second favorite song on this album. It's got the rebellious spirit of early Petty but with the more subdued delivery of the newly maturing Petty. It's catchy as all hell. Jangle jangle jangle in the foreground. Sing-along-background vocals. Feel A Whole Lot Better is a great breakup song with 100% less misogyny than previous Petty breakup songs. The mandolin has it feeling somewhere between a country song and something off of REM's Out Of Time. I debated having this as the final track but I'm a sucker for ending an album with a ballad. Probably the song I'm least familiar with on the album (though I know all the words) is Depending On You. It's another throwback to the earlier Heartbreakers sound, the ones where Petty sing-talks before falling back into the melody. If I had to lose a song on the album, it would be this. But I don't want to lose it, even if it structurally weakens the close of the album a bit with its reliance on someone else, which stands in start contrast with the message of every other song. There's a false start to the wonderfully sleepy lullaby, Alright For Now. This song would have fit right in on Wildflowers. In fact, "Wake Up Time" is almost a response to this track. And, okay, this also has a bit of co-dependent feel that clashes with the album's overall theme. But it's such a perfect summer lullaby. |
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