Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91)

Certain Songs #2563: Superchunk – “The Train From Kansas City”

March 1, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91)
Year: 1989

. . .

While Superchunk’s version of the immortal “The Train From Kansas City” wasn’t the first version I ever heard — that would be The Shop Assistants version from their 1988 album, which I’d purchased in the wake of my love for The Primitives — it was the first one that well and truly stuck with me. Probably because I listened to Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91) way more than I listened to that Shop Assistants album, though I did put their version of “The Train From Kansas City” on a mixtape, so it musta stuck stuck out a bit.

Certain Songs #2562: Superchunk – “Garlic”

February 28, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91)
Year: 1990

. . .

As someone who learned early on that the stinking rose makes just about every type of meat that much more tasty — and once or twice ate the stuff raw (after several drinks, of course) — I absolutely couldn’t resist one of the other highlights of Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91), the gloriously noisy “Garlic.”

Certain Songs #2561: Superchunk – “Slack Motherfucker”

February 27, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91)
Year: 1990

. . .

OK, so a couple of things here: I’m using a couple of technicalities to start off the Superchunk posts with “Slack Motherfucker.” First, while it was the first single to be credited to “Superchunk,” it wasn’t the first single they released, as they had released a single in 1989 — which has their great version of “Train From Kansas City,” — credited to “Chunk,” an inside joke based on the name of their drummer, Chuck Garrison, being misspelled in the phone book.

Secondly, while “Slack Motherfucker” also showed up on their 1991 self-titled debut, the album to hear it is their early singles compilation, 1992’s Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91), which I think rivals the Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady or Squeeze’s Singles 45s and Under in terms of perfectly capturing a band that left it all out there on the 7″ single.