Connells Archives - Medialoper

Album: Fun & Games
Year: 1989

What I liked about The Connells over so many of their second-tier jangly peers was the fact that they weren’t afraid to go big. To aim for anthems. Not every song, of course, but always a couple on each record.

Fun & Games — which Wikipedia tells me actually made it to #168 on the Billboard charts — probably contained more of these anthems than any of their other albums. Songs like “Hey Wow” (which I also loved cos that was a phrase an ex-girlfriend said all the time) and “Sat. Night (USA)” were full of group choruses and jubilant horn sections that anthem was the lead track “Something To Say,” which is probably my favorite Connells song.

Album: Boylan Heights
Year: 1987.

In the darker days of late 1987 — when the running joke among my little tribe was that our universe had so sped up that the only possible result was that the world ending on January 1, 1988 — one of the little pieces of sanity I hung onto was a cassette tape I made.

Now, of course, I made tons of cassette tapes. Tons and tons and tons. And this tape was nothing special, except that it contained two records that were both thematically and musically simpatico: Bobby Sutliff’s Only Ghosts Remain and The Connells’ Boylan Heights. Both were guitar-pop albums produced by Mitch Easter and released on TVT records. And both were full of songs about relationships falling apart, so they resonated with me both musically and lyrically.

Connells

Certain Songs #249: The Connells – “Something To Say”

Certain Songs #248: The Connells – “Scotty’s Lament”