Album: Is This It
Year: 2001
. . .
The biggest song on Is This It combined two flavors you wouldn’t think would taste great together and made a cool punk-adjacent hybrid out of them.
The first element was the jangly guitar rock of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, whose initial signature hit, “American Girl” was lifted pretty much wholesale for the opening, the guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr bouncing against each other as the song builds into its verses, at which point bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti go all Motown on us, just as Julian Casablancas sings the first verse.
Last night, she said
“Oh, baby, I feel so down
Oh, it turns me off
When I feel left out”
So I, I turned ’round
Oh, baby, don’t care no more
I know this for sure
I’m walking out that door
And then on the supremely catchy chorus, they put it all together, as Casablancas makes an pretty easily-remembered list of who just won’t understand.
And say, people, they don’t understand
No, girlfriends, they can’t understand
Your grandsons, they won’t understand
On top of this, I ain’t ever gonna understand
After that, there’s a quick cool guitar solo from Hammond, Jr, after which they give us one last verse, and an instrumental chorus, after which “Last Nite” basically just ends. That said, it’s probably their most popular song: it topped the U.K. indie charts and made it to #14 on their singles charts. Meanwhile, here in America, where we were all still in denial about rock dying as a truly popular artform — the thing that The Strokes were supposed to help reverse — it made it to #5 on the Alternative Airplay chart, but not the Hot 100. That said, it’s their most streamed song on Spotify, for what its worth.
“Last Nite”
“Last Nite” Official Video
“Last Nite” Live on Later with Jools Holland, 2006
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