mkilby

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Toad the Wet Sprocket – All I Want Lyrics 21 years ago
I learned some interesting facts about this band recently. These teenage band members got the name when they were sitting around watching "Monty Python's Flying Circus" reruns. In one of those BBC spoofs, Eric Idle had an inane report about the "internationally famous rock band 'Toad the Wet Sprocket' will begin it's worldwide tour of Finland today..." He chose that silly name because he was trying to think of "the least likely name for a hit band". So when TTWS formed and recorded their first album (for $650 in a home studio, making it an album with one of the largest profit margins of all time, since it still sells a few hundred copies every week, essentially returning the cost of production on a weekly basis), they sent a cassette tape to Eric Idle and he corresponded with them about their new-found success. Interestingly, this song, "All I Need", the only #1 hit they ever had, was nearly cut from the album because the record company said something had to go and this was the band's least favorite tune.

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Wilco – The Late Greats Lyrics 21 years ago
I saw Wilco playing in a small venue in Birmingham the same night they won two Grammies...they didn't seem to know how to react, whether to be thrilled and cocky or sarcastic because fame and fortune is not really supposed to be what they are about. So they opened the show by announcing they just learned they won two Grammies (in a deadpan voice, Tweedy said, "Before we were losers, now we are winners") and then they played this song first...."The greatest lost track of all time....I can never hear it on the radio." It was a nice moment.

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Uncle Tupelo – Black Eye Lyrics 21 years ago
I love this song too. I've always assumed the black eye is a metaphor for enduring the pains of life. When he was a young man, he took pride in his black eye (and studied his reflection in the mirror), presumably acquired in a macho-teenage brawl. But when he got older, life gave him a more permanent black ring around the eyes (maybe disease related to coal-mining, which half of Uncle Tupelo's songs seem to relate to? or just alcholism/depression/hard labor?). "When he realized/That this one was here to stay/He took down/All the mirrors in the hallway/And thought only of his younger face." I guess to me this is a sad commentary on how the painful initiations of youth, that once were a point of pride, come to mean something all together different when adversity piles up and becomes monotonous and hopeless in the setting so familiar to Tweedy and Farrar, a midwestern community burdened down by hard labor and poverty.

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Billy Bragg and Wilco – California Stars Lyrics 21 years ago
I just finished Bob Dylan's autobiography, "Chronicles", where he mentions this famous set of songs. This is, of course, one of the song lyrics written by Woodie Guthrie but never put to music during his lifetime. Bob Dylan used to go to Guthrie's bedside (in a mental institution with Huntington's disease) once a week in 1960 and play Guthrie's songs for Guthrie. Guthrie told Dylan he could have the lyrics for ~400 songs under his old bed in New Jersey, since he didn't expect to ever be released from the facility. So Dylan took the train out to Guthrie's former home, slogged through a swamp, and knocked on the door. But the Guthrie friend/babysitter wouldn't let him in. So Dylan comments that 40 years later, Guthrie's granddaughter offered these lyrics to Billy Bragg and Wilco, even though Dylan should have had first dibs years before the Wilco bandmembers were even born. I can't imagine this song being any better than Tweedy made it, but it's an interesting story that Dylan attempts to tell without conveying any bitterness.

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Wilco – At Least That's What You Said Lyrics 21 years ago
The guitar kicking in is so powerful...hard not to compare it to Radiohead's Creep because that electric guitar part becomes a character in the story. I got to see them perform an incredible show up close and personal in an old movie theatre last week. Amazing band with a bizarre, hypnotizing video running behind them carefully choreographed to the music.

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Wilco – Dash 7 Lyrics 21 years ago
Somebody help me with this song, which has always haunted me? Something about fear of flying/fear of relationships? What is the title, "Dash 7 pointed down"?

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Jimmy Eat World – Work Lyrics 21 years ago
I like this song...didn't realize it was "Jimmy Eat World" until I put the chorus lyrics into Google. I'm probably the oldest one on here, but the lead singer's voice sounds very much like a one-album wonder band called the "Connells" about 15 years ago. Surely there's no relation? Is the remainder of the album comparable to this song?

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