Certain Songs

Certain Songs #2733: Tina Turner – “Nutbush City Limits”

November 14, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: All The Best
Year: 1973

. . .

Confession time: I’ve never been a huge fan of “Proud Mary.” In any incarnation. I’m not denying that it’s a great song, an American classic, and that Tina & Ike Turner did a dynamite job turning it into what was by far their biggest hit in 1971. I just don’t love it. So that’s why I’m not writing about it, in case you were curious.

Much more my liking was their final hit, 1973’s “Nutbush City Limits,” a weird bouncy semi-autobiographical song written by Tina herself.

Certain Songs #2732: Tina Turner – “River Deep-Mountain High”

November 13, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Simply The Best
Year: 1966

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“River Deep-Mountain High” found Tina Turner for the first time escaping the musical clutches of the evil genius Ike Turner and heading for the safety of — checks notes — the evil genius Phil Spector. Oh.

Apparently, Spector had caught the Ike & Tina Turner Revue — who BTW, were already enough of a success to have had a million selling #14 Grammy nominated song called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” in 1961 — and had them close his 1966 The Big T.N.T. Show concert film. Some of the other folks in that film: The Byrds, Bo Diddley, Joan Baez, Roger Miller and Ray Charles, not exactly a collection of scrubs.

Certain Songs #2731: Time Zone – “World Destruction”

November 8, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Single, 1984

. . .

As some of you might have noticed, one of the major subgenres of of Certain Songs is Nuclear Paranoia Songs From The 1980s — “Read About It,” “So Afraid of the Russians,” “Games Without Frontiers,” “1999,” “Party At Ground Zero” “Stop The World,” etc — and today’s entry is one of the greatest of them all. Weirdly enough, it seems far more obscure than it should be: you’d think that since “World Destruction” was a titanic collaboration between one of the key figures of hip-hop and one of the key figures of punk brokered by one of the key figures in experimental music, it would at least have its own Wikipedia page.

Certain Songs #2730: Tim Heidecker – “Buddy”

November 7, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: High School
Year: 2022

. . .

So I’ll admit it up front: I’m basically 1000% ignorant about the comedy, acting, and musical career of Tim Heidecker. Like, I knew that he was a person that existed in the universe, and I knew that his Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! was also a thing. But it — or any of his other shows or podcasts, etc — was never a thing that I ever checked out. No insult intended, but there is more popular culture than there is time, and I’m probably outside of the right demographic.

Certain Songs #2729: ’til tuesday – “Voices Carry”

November 6, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Voices Carry
Year: 1985

. . .

Well, I’m not even sure where to start with the utterly titanic “Voices Carry,” a song that actually changed me. Or at least helped me change one of my key philosophies about how I enjoy art.

Because here’s the thing: with its “chunka-chunka-chunka” rhythm guitar, utterly colorless synths, and a conceptual music video — that actually had dialog that wasn’t in the song — which got played approximately 47,000 times a day on MTV, I should have utterly despised “Voices Carry.” On the surface, it was every single thing I hated about music in 1985: a perfectly-coiffed “new wave” band — with the lead singer sporting a highly ostensible rattail — making utterly pedestrian pop that was precision-tooled to top the charts, whilst my beloved R.E.M. and Replacements and Hüsker Dü were struggling to get heard outside of college radio.

Well, fuck that. Case closed. Next!

Certain Songs #2728: Tift Merritt – “Write My Ticket”

November 2, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Tambourine
Year: 2004

. . .

He’s probably not going to read this, but I blame Jay. Not for me getting sick, but for where I was when it first dawned upon me that I must have caught food poisoning.

It was September 2004, the second night of our first visit to New York City and Rox & I were at Jay and Emily’s apartment in Brooklyn, having just had a lovely dinner — not the meal that got me sick, nope, I’m pretty sure that was an undercooked burger I’d eaten at a dubious-looking joint during lunch — and just as we were going to ready to head back to our hotel in mid-town Manhattan, Jay asked me if I’d heard Tift Merritt’s Tambourine.

Certain Songs #2727: Thurston Moore – “Grace Lake”

November 1, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Best Day
Year: 2014

. . .

While Thurston Moore started putting out solo albums in 1995, the only one that fully caught my attention in the same way my favorite Sonic Youth records was his fourth one, 2014’s The Best Day, which was kind of an upbeat “fuck you” to the people who were still pissed off that Sonic Youth broke up the way they did.

And because I’m a shallow person, I like The Best Day because Moore essentially put together a band for it that was not so far off from Sonic Youth: a second noise-rock guitarist named James Sedwards, a ringer bassist in My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe, and an even more ringer drummer in Sonic Youth’s Steven Shelley.

Certain Songs #2726: Thunderclap Newman – “Something in the Air”

October 31, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Hollywood Dream
Year: 1969

. . .

So the story goes that John “Speedy” Keen was both the flatmate of and driver for Pete Townshend, while playing drums and singing with quite a few bands as well. Which of course, makes sense: if you lived in London in the mid-1960s, it was mandated by law that you had to be in a band.

That said, Townshend liked Keen’s songwriting so much, he commissioned Future Certain Song “Armenia City in the Sky,” which ended up being the opening salvo of the immortal The Who Sell Out, about which much much much more when we get there.

Certain Songs #2725: The Thrills – “Found My Rosebud”

October 30, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Let’s Bottle Bohemia
Year: 2004

. . .

Like so many other young bands, The Thrills found it more difficult on their second album, 2004’s Let’s Bottle Bohemia then they had on their 2003 debut, So Much For The City. With only a year between records, the songwriting just wasn’t there, and while they didn’t write another batch of songs about how great they imagined it was in California, not even guest shots by Peter Buck and Van Dyke Parks could make a difference.

Certain Songs #2724: The Thrills – “One Horse Town”

October 29, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: So Much For The City
Year: 2003

. . .

With song titles like “Santa Cruz (You’re Not That Far),” “Big Sur” and “Don’t Steal Our Sun,” you might expect that The Thrills — how did that name go unused until the 21st century? — were a group that came from sunny California.

But that was just an aspiration: it turned out that The Thrills came from the decidedly unsunny Dublin, Ireland, and had no real experience with the subject matter — instead, lead singer Conor Deasy just basically made up what he thought might happen in these places, and those tales permeated their debut, 2003’s So Much For The City.