How Good It Is

When Jimmy Webb got his heart broken, what did he do? Why, he did what any other red-blooded American would do: he wrote a couple of hit songs and made a million bucks off the incident! OK, that’s not the most common reaction, but it’s what happened back in 1967, when he wrote a song that was turned down by The Association, but picked up by an actor who’d decided he wanted to con...

The original promo 45, showing the edited A side. The full-length song is the B. In the late 1950s, Marty Robbins, who was commuting hundreds of miles between his home in Phoenix and various gigs in Texas, frequently passed through the town of El Paso on his journeys to and fro. The town inspired him to write a cinematic-level song with nine verses and three bridges—and no chorus. Plus, it clocked...

Hey, everybody makes a mistake now and then. That’s why they put erasers on pencils, am I right? But once in awhile, someone will make a mistake that manages to enhance rather than detract (“ Eminence Front,” I’m looking at you. ). And that’s where we’re going this week: we’ll look at four songs that had mistakes in them where the artists made a conscious...

Today we're commemorating the 40th anniversary of the plane crash that killed several members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd and their manager with a look at the song that became their signature tune.

This week we’re going to dive into famous songs that were recorded by other artists first. Some of them you’re going to know about because practically everybody knows about them, but I think there will be a few surprises in there. I know that one of them came as a pretty big surprise to me! If you hit me up on Twitter and ask real pretty, I may tell you which Stevie Wonder song I was t...

This was the song that heralded the Dylan Goes Electric era, and when he first played it live at the 1965 Newport Music Festival, he was met with boos and charges that he’d sold out, or was somehow a “traitor” to his folk roots. But Bob Dylan stuck to his guns, and “Like a Rolling Stone” became, and remains, his biggest single ever. This is the picture sleeve of the 4...

This was the A side of the record, remember. This week we’re taking a look at a song that was never meant to be a hit. In fact, it wouldn’t even have appeared on a record if some musicians hadn’t been hanging around when someone realized that the record he’d been working on didn’t have a B side. So he rounded up whomever he could find and fortunately, the saxophone pl...

This is the original sleeve that the record came in. I still have mine, though not quite in this condition. In the mid 1970s, George Harrison was having a rough time of it. He was still embroiled in the lawsuit over “My Sweet Lord”, he was tangled up in other legal issues caused by his breakup with his business manager, his album Extra Texture had taken a beating by the critics, and to...

Wait, Phil Collins did what ? He drowned a guy? Uh…no. He humiliated a coward? No. He shamed someone from his childhood? Also, no. Many stories swirl around the meaning of Phil Collins’ breakout hit from 1981, and so many of them aren’t true. Collins was in a world of hurt following the breakup of his first marriage, and he channeled a lot of that energy into writing the Face Val...

One of several labels used for the 45 of this song. I think this was the retail version of the original release, based on what the promo label looks like. Chester (“Chet”) Powers was a musician who was well-known in the café scenes on both coasts, and certainly had his influence on other musicians. He’s also known for being a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service. But...

Click here for a transcript of this week’s show.  This week, we’re taking a look at the Buckinghams, a Chicago-based group which had five big hits, all of which charted in a single year, after which they practically disappeared off the charts. For thirty years I harbored a suspicion that most of their hits were all about the same person, so I did a little research to find out what the...

This is the sleeve for the Danish release of the record. Click here for a transcript of this episode.  For Episode 2, we take a journey to Japan and look into an international hit from a day when I was about four months old. I’ll tell you about: What ALL the lyrics to the song mean The political turmoil that led to a song about lost love Whatever happened to Kyu Sakamoto, anyway? Why I need...

Click here for a transcript of this episode. In our premiere episode, we take a look at 10cc’s biggest hit, “I’m Not In Love”. We’ll talk about: What does that title mean, anyway? Where did that ethereal sound come from? What’s the story behind the band’s name? Your RSS feed should have the post by now, but you can always listen to it right here: I think w...