We're Not Who You Think We Are
Album: Gotta Let This Hen Out!
Year: 1985
. . .
But probably my favorite song on Gotta Let This Hen Out! was the penultimate track, and it was barely a song at all, but rather just a really big riff and a massive hook.
Which was good enough for me.
Album: Gotta Let This Hen Out!
Year: 1985
. . .
So while I played Fegmania! a lot on KFSR, I utterly wore out Gotta Let This Hen Out! playing pretty much the whole record: things like “Kingdom of Love,” “Brenda’s Iron Sledge,” “The Cars She Used to Drive,” “My Wife and My Dead Wife,” were at least the equal and usually much better than their original studio versions as pared-down arrangements plus the excitement of live performance pushed them higher..
And the highest push was for “Heaven,” which went from being one of the better songs on the relatively weak Fegmania! to being one of the better songs on one of Robyn Hitchcock’s masterpieces.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1959: Robyn Hitchcock – “Heaven (London 04-27-1985)”
Album: Gotta Let This Hen Out!
Year: 1985
. . .
The 1980s were not a good time for live albums.
When the subject comes up, of course, people usually cite Stop Making Sense, but in my TED Talk, I will show that while Stop Making Sense remains an absolutely superlative concert film, the original issue of the album remains underwhelming. Not only did they repeat three titles from 1982’s superior The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, two of them — “Take Me To The River” & “Life During Wartime” — were inferior to the the ones they captured with the Adrian Belew version of the band.
Album: Gotta Let This Hen Out!
Year: 1985
. . .
Last week, I pointed out that one of the charms of the songs on Robyn Hitchcock’s I Often Dream of Trains was that you could tell that he was still kind of writing some of them for a band, which is totally borne out by how easily “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl,” the opening track of his 1985 live album, the extraordinary Gotta Let This Hen Out!, translated to a full band.