B-side, 1985
Arriving our lives a scant six months after New Day Rising, the titanic “Makes No Sense At All” was yet another electric jolt from the Hüskers, but we’ll get to that tomorrow.
Today, I want to talk about the b-side of that single, their cover of Sonny Curtis’ “Love Is All Around,” which, of course was the theme song to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was set in Minneapolis.
Unlike the world-record catharsis of their unmatched cover of “Eight Miles High,” — which, lest you forget, was only a year previously — their cover of “Love Is All Around” was relatively straight. Sure the guitar was crunchy, and Hart’s kick drum drove the beat, but the tempo was slow, even during the double-time ending.
So the overall aspect was dreamy not screaming, to the point where it even ended with Hart going “doo do doo” after using his falsetto to harmonize with a softly singing Mould.
But here’s the thing: underneath the placid exterior is an entire take of Bob Mould singing his lungs out, screaming and yelling and nearly trashing the song in the way lesser hardcore bands routinely did when they deigned to do a cover.
For some reason — probably because our drummer wasn’t good enough to do an actual Hüsker Dü cover — we covered this cover for awhile in Sedan Delivery, and it worked on a couple of different levels: “Love Is All Around” is a good enough pop song to stand on its own; it referenced childhood memories of watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and some people even knew that we were doing it because Hüsker Dü did it.
“Love is All Around”
Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.
Certain Songs Spotify playlist
(It’s recommended that you listen to this on Spotify as their embed only has 200 songs.)
Support “Certain Songs” with a donation on Patreon
Go to my Patreon page