Blusher

Certain Songs #1175: The Miss Alans – “Mag Wheel”

April 2, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Blusher
Year: 1994

Ron Woods has an unorthodox drum set-up. For one thing, it’s backwards! His hi-hat and snare drum are on the right instead of the left, what even is up with that?!?

In truth, I’ve always assumed that the best thing about being a left-handed drummer is that it makes it impossible for other asshole drummers to just sit down and start playing your drums, as I know — and Ron most certainly knows — I would have done many many times over the years.

Certain Songs #1174: The Miss Alans – “Supercharged”

April 1, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Blusher
Year: 1994

The Miss Alans went out on tour around the time that Blusher was released in the spring of 1994, opening for a band called Medicine, a band once called by Pitchfork as America’s answer to My Bloody Valentine, whom I don’t recall as asking any questions of us beyond “are you ears bleeding yet?” And they already knew the answer to that one.

In any event, Medicine was working some of the same territory as The Miss Alans, but with way more noise and way less pop, and I recall thinking that they were OK when I drove up to San Francisco to catch the show at the end of the tour.

Certain Songs #1173: The Miss Alans – “Winona”

March 31, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Blusher
Year: 1994

One of the incredibly small cohort of Certain Songs that might or might not be about Winona Ryder, but were definitely called “Winona” and definitely came out on Zoo Records — the other, of course, being Matthew Sweet’s — it turns out that the Miss Alans were relatively early on what has been an ongoing trend.

They maybe have been behind Matthew Sweet, but they were definitely ahead of Beck, Soul Asylum, the Old 97’s and Ryan Adams, which may have been why Ron was initially against recording it. He clearly saw the future, which is now cluttered by songs about Winona Ryder, as I discovered by googling “songs about Winona Ryder.”

Certain Songs #1172: The Miss Alans – “Victoria”

March 30, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Blusher
Year: 1994

Oh yeah, “Victoria.” While it’s only my second favorite song on Blusher, it’s probably a contender for the greatest song The Miss Alans ever did. How in the hell “Victoria” didn’t totally and completely take over alternative rock playlists in 1994 is still beyond me.

Except, of course, for all of its charms, it really was’t a radio-friendly single: there was no chorus, and of course the entire last minute of the song was an instrumental rave-up and rave-down, featuring no vocals whatsoever. Hell, even “Marquee Moon” featured one last verse at the end.

That said, the version of “Victoria” that ended up on Blusher remains an marvelous gem of a psychedelic rock song: half Television and half the Velvet Underground, while remaining entirely The Miss Alans. Not to mention an absolute crowd-pleaser live, where the rave-up part went a full minute longer, because why the hell not?

Certain Songs #1171: The Miss Alans – “Big Parade”

March 29, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Blusher
Year: 1994

Blusher is my favorite Miss Alans album.

Their first and only major label release — on Zoo Entertainment, a subsidiary of BMG — it was their shot at having the same kind of success as comparable artists such as Belly or Teenage Fanclub, and if they ran the table, Matthew Sweet or The Smashing Pumpkins.

While Blusher didn’t come out until May, 1994, I remember having been given a tape of many of the songs from it almost a year prior — the major-label gears grinding even more slowly than the indies — and being struck by how big and calm it sounded, full of songs that knew where they were going, and didn’t mind how long it might take to get there.