We're Not Who You Think We Are
Album: Where Did Our Love Go?
Year: 1964
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It took them three years and twice as many singles to get going, but once they did — with “Where Did Our Love Go” — the aptly-named Supremes were perhaps the most reliable hit-makers of the 1960s, selling tens of millions of records in the process, and generally recognized as one of the most popular American groups ever.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2582: The Supremes – “Come See About Me”
Album: Breakfast in America
Year: 1979
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I never bought a Supertramp album; I never saw a Supertramp concert. And yet, I know all their 1974-1979 albums very very well. Why? Because I lived in Fresno, California, one of the biggest hotbeds of Supertramp fandom in, well, the world.
How big? In 1977, then-mayor Daniel K. Whitehurst gave them the Key to The City of Fresno. Two years before Breakfast in America made them multi-platinum, chart-topping stars. Weirdly, the only reason I remember this is that I read about it in Creem Magazine, which was clearly my main source of Fresno music news in the late 1970s.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2581: Supertramp – “The Logical Song”
Album: Even in the Quietest Moments
Year: 1977
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In the mid-1970s few bands played both sides of the AM/FM divide better than Supertramp, aiming singles at the AM market while their longer, artier cuts got played on FM stations. Nowhere was this more pronounced than on their fifth album, 1977’s “Even in The Quietest Moments,” which featured their first top U.S. Top 20 single, the perfectly serviceable “Give A Little Bit,” but also FM fare like “Lover Boy” and the utterly gorgeous title track, which I only came to love decades later, even though I’m pretty sure I heard it all the time on stations like KFIG and Rock 96FM.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2580: Supertramp – “Even in the Quietest Moments”
Album: Crime of The Century
Year: 1974
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The first thing you should know about “Bloody Well Right” was that it wasn’t really intended to be the lead single from Crime of The Century, which featured that trippy “jail in SPACE” album cover, a marked improvement on the probably infamous and now problematic cover of their previous album, Indelibly Stamped, which I’ve still never heard anything from. Or their first, self-titled album, for that matter.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2579: Supertramp – “Bloody Well Right”
Album: In It For The Money
Year: 1997
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Determined to prove that their instant success — in the U.K, of course — with I Should Coco wasn’t fluke, Supergrass reportedly turned down an offer from Steven Speilberg to become the 1990s version of the Monkees, a factlet that even when sourced back to an old SPIN Magazine article, I still don’t quite believe.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2578: Supergrass – “Sun Hits The Sky”
Album: I Should Coco
Year: 1995
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Unlike their Britpop peers like Blur, Oasis or even The Verve, Supergrass never came close to having a fluke U.S. hit, even as they were utterly massive over in their native U.K. I was going to do a whole thing about comparing them to The Kinks versus Oasis and Blur being the Beatles and The Stones, but it didn’t quite scan properly, for any number of reasons, so just know this: between 1992-1998, Supergrass had eight straight singles in the U.K. top 20, which is most certainly something.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2577: Supergrass – “Alright”
Album: Wild Loneliness
Year: 2022
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The last song on the most recent Superchunk album kinda really sums things up in a lot of ways. Fading in with a picked acoustic guitar circling around some controlled feedback, it seems like it’s going to be a quiet slow reflective one.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2576: Superchunk – “If You’re Not Dark”
Album: Wild Loneliness
Year: 2022
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Somehow, we’re three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, but I still often think about how billions of lives and trillions of plans got derailed by it, even if I focus on all of the things I never got to experience in 2020 and 2021 because of it, especially when it came to my band, Sedan Delivery, who recorded an album in late 2019 and was just about to get it mastered for release when the world shut down.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2575: Superchunk – “Endless Summer”
Album: What A Time To Be Alive
Year: 2018
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One of the slyer songs on 2018’s angry What A Time to Be Alive harkened back to the 1980s, when we were all young and railing against the presidency of one Ronald Reagan, who — perhaps starting when the Dead Kennedys rewrote their Jerry Brown satire “California Uber Alles” as “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” — was such a target for hardcore that my friends The Miss Alans jokingly did a song called “Reagan Sucks” that was basically four bars of speedy noise and them yelling “Reagan Sucks!!!” one time.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2574: Superchunk – “Reagan Youth”
Album: What a Time To Be Alive
Year: 2018
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If you’re one of those people who follows Superchunk’s official Twitter account, then you know that Mac — who runs it — wears his political heart on his sleeve. And I might be projecting a bit, but he’s a clearly a fire-breathing lefty, who isn’t afraid to engage with the world, record sales be damned. And more power to him.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2573: Superchunk – “Erasure”