Chasing the long tail of new media
Album: Fight Songs
Year: 1999
My favorite song on Fight Songs isn’t really a fight song, or even a love song really, and it sure as hell isn’t alt-country either.
What it is, however, is a song that combines both Rhett Miller’s penchant for clever lyrics and his ability to write a plaintive melody line that sticks in your head.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1386: Old 97’s – “Murder (or a Heart Attack)”
Album: Fight Songs
Year: 1999
If the Old 97’s breakthrough album, 1997’s Too Far To Care, was both an amplification and expansion of their alt-country roots, then the follow-up, 1999’s Fight Songs, was a conscious effort to break out of alt-country once and for all.
Instead, they moved more towards straight out rock ‘n’ roll, while still keeping one foot in the alt-country world, with the opening track on Fight Songs, “Jagged” as a near-perfect transition. As well as one of their very best songs.
Album: Too Far To Care
Year: 1997
One of the most quotable songs in the whole Old 97’s canon, “Barrier Reef” is a winning mix of a huge-ass Ken Berthea guitar riff, a jaunty beat from drummer Phillip Peeples and a vocal from Rhett Miller that perfectly caught the ambivalence he was singing about.
And what was he so ambivalent about? As it turns out, a one-night stand that at least superficially went exactly the way he wanted it to go. Which was the problem.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1384: Old 97’s – “Barrier Reef”
Album: Too Far To Care
Year: 1997
Hailing from Dallas, Texas, the Old 97’s have been putting their raucous spin on what we used to call alt-country for 25 years now.
Featuring ageless lead singer Stuart Ransom “Rhett” Miller II, a former teenaged songwriting prodigy who retains a gift for slightly dirty one-liners, and guitarist Ken Bethea, who alternates hooks and snarling leads, they’ve remained remarkably consistent during that time: you could pick up literally any Old 97’s album from any part of their career and walk away humming.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1383: Old 97’s – “Timebomb”
Album: Ship Ahoy
Year: 1973
Even on the AM radio in 1973, you could tell just how weird and fucked-up the production of “For The Love of Money” was.
First off there was that bassline: weirdly echoing around itself; simultaneously creating and filling space around itself. And in fact, it was so unique that bassist Anthony Jackson ended up with a partial songwriting credit, which probably changed his life forever, as “For The Love of Money” is yet another one of those songs that has never left popular culture.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1382: O’Jays – “For The Love of Money”
Album: Back Stabbers
Year: 1972
Boy, talk about message whiplash! It takes some balls to follow up your massive hit single about how you can’t trust anybody at all with a even massiver hit single about how we should all get together and create an utopia.
Which is it, O’Jays? Which is it!?!
The answer, of course, was both: after all, it wasn’t as if the O’Jays were writing their own songs. Instead, they were just plugging their vocal chops into a song that Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff had crafted to within an inch of its life.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1381: O’Jays – “Love Train”
Album: Back Stabbers
Year: 1972
As an adult, the smooth Philly soul that came out from Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff in the 1970s has always been kind of a blind spot for me, as from my teenaged years on I’ve tended to avoid music that has “smooth” attached to it, regardless of genre.
But as a kid, I loved a shitton of the singles that came out of that factory, especially the ones by the O’Jays, who rode on top of Gamble & Huff’s massive songscapes like the long-time pros they so obviously were. And as a matter of fact, they’d been kicking around since the late-1950s, but it wasn’t until they hooked up with Gamble & Huff that they had any kind of pop success.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1380: O’Jays – “Back Stabbers
Album: Oil Tasters
Year: 1982
Even by the wild and wooly standards of early 1980s indie, Oil Tasters were pretty fucking weird.
Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Oil Tasters were a three-piece band consisting of bass, drums and saxophone. No guitars. They played a kinda funky, jazzy spin on punk rock. Perhaps the closest analogy was the Minutemen, minus the guitars and virtuosity.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1379: Oil Tasters – “Get Out of the Bathroom”
Album: Furthermore What EP
Year: 1983
I’m 98.674% sure I’ll talk about the impact that R.E.M. had on our little tribe in a lot more detail at some point next year (!!), but for now all you really need to know that by the time 1983 was even half-over, we were mad for just about anything R.E.M.-related.
So you can only imagine the excitement when Oh-OK’s second EP (we never heard the first), Furthermore What, showed up at KFSR. Not only was it produced by Mitch Easter, whose Let’s Active afoot EP was also a big deal, but the bassist was Michael Stipe’s actual sister, Lynda.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1378: Oh-OK – “Such N Such”
Album: On
Year: 1979
1979 was a weird year for music: while it was clear that punk rock and disco shook everything up, it was unclear what exactly came next, and so while “My Sharona” was the biggest song of the year, and the pop charts would make room for Nick Lowe, Cheap Trick and Supertramp, rock radio was at a crossroads.
While there was the beginning of the college / alt-rock radio revolution that would dominate some of our lives in the 1970, rock radio had spent a couple of years resisting punk rock while bands like Talking Heads, Blondie and even my beloved Clash were making serious inroads, being played next to supposed mortal enemies like Led Zeppelin, Rush, and Supertramp, who were fucking everywhere that year.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1377: Off Broadway – “Stay in Time”