10,000 Maniacs formed in Jamestown, NY in the 1980s and quickly made a name for themselves on the Buffalo music scene, eventually getting a major label record deal and a broader audience.
This was the band's 4th single from their 1987 album In My Tribe, and despite the heaviness of the song, it was a minor hit for the band. Natalie Merchant and Peter Buck wrote the song, from the point of view of someone seeing a neighbor's child being abused.
The band still performs the song live, with Mary Ramsey on the microphone now. It's still just as poignant.
If you live in Western New York, you know who Ani DiFranco is. She's one of the first artists to eschew major label flirting with her and go off in her own direction.... and still remained financially viable and visible to big names in Hollywood. While she left Buffalo many years ago, that is where she grew up and recorded much of her earlier music.
A lot of times we post the first hits by bands. This was one of the last songs by the Goo Goo Dolls that wasn't a gigantic hit - and on the first album where Johnny Rzeznik was primary lead vocalist (he had previously been an occasional vocalist and fulltime guitarist), which set up the big stardom to come. This song is far more straight-ahead rock and less acoustic-driven than their later hits, but that doesn't make it bad. Lyrically, it is a song of despair and anguish over a breakup.
Primarily filmed at what was Pilot Field in downtown Buffalo, NY, the band's hometown, the band's first ever video serves as a tribute to Buffalo, showing a lot of familiar sites around the city (yes, I can mentally drive the first few seconds of the video). Bit of an "inside baseball" fact for someone who spent a fair amount of growing up in the Buffalo area - at 2:27, the video is filmed ON the border between the United States and Canada - something of a no-man's land, between the two flags on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls.
So, since they're big hit makers, I'm sure they don't play their old stuff anymore, right?
My mother would have been 74 years old today. She passed away last year, in March, after a long battle with a disorder known as posterior cortical atrophy, so this is my family's first birthday of hers without her. As something of a tribute, I felt it right to pay tribute to a band she enjoyed.
As a kid, and really, into adulthood, my mother's favorite band was The Beach Boys - she was a teen in the 1960's, after all. Now, as a kid, I heard songs like "Surfin' USA" and "California Girls" and thought they were kind of cheesy. As I grew older, though, I realized how difficult such harmonies could be, and I, too, gained an appreciation for them.
And then I discovered Pet Sounds. That is an amazing album, and if you haven't listened to the audio experimentation that's going on there, you need to go listen to it now. It's an incredible albums - Brian Wilson's masterpiece. That album helped me appreciate the earlier AND later works of the band as well.
This song, co-written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, opened Side 2 of Pet Sounds and is regarded by many as the greatest song ever written. This version, which was a top 40 hit, featured rare vocalist Carl Wilson on lead, which was a stroke of additional genius in an already great song.
Of course, the song became a live staple. Here is the band performing the song in 1980, the last time the original members of the band (Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, along with Al Jardine) would appear on a UK stage together.
Kind of. Shakira and will.i.am were working on this song in 2008, and finally got around to recording and releasing this fantastic, strangely intimate collaboration. How many callbacks to old Shakia songs do you hear? How many times is apl.d.ap using terrible Spanish? All we know is, it's a fun song.
The song is presently on the Billboard charts, as we write this, #35 with a bullet. The video was filmed in Los Angeles (the Peas) and Barcelona (Shakira), and yet it looks like they're in the same room.
The mid-90's brought us a lot of angry-sounding female singer-songwriters, largely due to the appeal of Liz Phair. Yep, I'm giving the credit to Liz. Fight me in the comments.
Some were excellent. Some were awful.
Poe managed to stand out from that crowd by bringing members of Suicidal Tendencies and Guns 'n' Roses into the studio with her. Her music was - is - borderline experimental folk-punk. Her first big single was "Trigger Happy Jack", a justifiably angry song that makes what I think is a pretty obvious statement in the chorus.
One great thing about Poe is that she is just as emotive live as she was on video. Watch her throw her whole body into this performance.
