Tag: The Cars

That’s A Wrap . . . On 2023 (Sort Of)

It’s been a bit surprising to learn how important Spotify’s personalized year end wrap ups are to some listeners. Reddit – my current favourite social media hang spot – is filled with folks sharing their top 5 artists, total listening time, and other badges of their dedication to music generally and certain artists specifically. I feel like a slacker compared to some of them: my measly 89,300 minutes of listening can’t compete with people who are over 400,000, which can only be accomplished if (1) it is streaming while you sleep (which is a cheat, frankly) or (2) you have a serious need to see a doctor about your life-threatening insomnia. And the 909 minutes I spent on my act shows that I am a puny being unworthy of being called a fan when one listener showed proof that she spent over 290,000 minutes – that is, the equivalent of 201+ days – on Taylor Swift’s music alone. To my daughter Nicole: the gauntlet has been thrown down.

The real news to me personally was that, for all the effort I put into finding and listening to new music, not a lot of it makes its way into heavy rotation. Spotify has noticed that I do this, as lately it has been serving up more and more obscure acts for me to check out, like Wry (1,165 monthly listeners) and Scorpion Wolf Shark (6!). Still, the absence of these musical adventures makes sense: much of my listening is casual or in the company of my spouse, meaning I tend to favour things we both know and like. Exploration requires an element of focus that I just don’t have while puttering around the kitchen sous chef-ing or when doing the laundry. There are three tunes from Sobs released in 2022, a bunch of that year’s Oscar nominated tracks, my favourite cut from Lil Nas X’s last album, and that’s it for more recent releases.

Not news was that my favourite songs are dominated by music that I wrote about: my most listened to track was The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” (34 times, which seems like a total that could happen by accident), The Romantics’ “What I Like About You” came in at #3, and they were joined by other Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited alumni like Phil Collins, Rick Springfield and The Outfield. I have all of these songs on a single playlist, and wrote about them because I love them, so of course they get played a lot. (No, “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero” did not make the cut.)

There were a few surprises. I love “Close To Me” by The Cure but had no idea it was my fifth most played song of the year. I did not play Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams (Come True)” even once with intent, yet there it is, snuggled in between Gazebo’s “I Like Chopin” and “Hey Ya!” from Outkast. I didn’t even know that The Flashing Lights existed until mid-August, but I have played them so much since that “Been Waiting” made the cut. Right ahead of them is my favourite surprise: “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” a 1968 track from The Bob Seger System that I didn’t know before but Spotify correctly thought I might enjoy.

As for that 909-minute top act, it was Fountains of Wayne, and I totally believe that: their music is a form of really healthy comfort food for me. Elvis Costello is at #2 with the Attractions and at #4 on his own, and both of those track: he is one of the artists who my wife and I share an enjoyment of. The Rolling Stones are 3rd, and while it was a bit surprising, I did write about them a few times. But #5 is Bruce Springsteen, and other than “The River”, which somehow isn’t among my most played, I have a hard time recalling any time when I played one of his songs on purpose. But the numbers say I played him a lot, so I can’t really argue it.

From the comments on Reddit, I can’t tell if my experience is that unique. People are posting their top fives, and I have not seen a single one of my top 100 songs on any of these lists. Nobody on Reddit seems to have been listening to music from the 1950s, and my dominant era of the 1970s and 1980s is also not getting much love. I don’t really see anything whacky, like Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” in the middle of four Megadeth tracks. My favourite is probably the user who has three Tina Turner songs, the end credits theme to “Charlotte’s Web” (it doesn’t indicate which version) and a track from the video game Persona 4 Golden, followed by the guy who had one hard rock song (I can’t recall what it was) and four stand up comedy bits from Christopher Titus, who I will absolutely be checking out. Those are some distinctive choices.

I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of Spotify: I’m in the top 2% of worldwide users. And while I feel a little guilty about artists getting shafted by the payment model, it’s not like they weren’t also getting screwed by every other iteration of the music industry since time immemorial. I listened to 5,149 artists this year, and that number would be much, much smaller if I had been required to pay for a record from each of them. Thanks to Spotify, I discovered artists that I love, like The LeeVees (nothing but songs about Hanukkah) and Nerf Herder, and was able to become reacquainted with acts like folk rocker James McMurtry (whose fantastic 1989 debut album “Too Long in the Wasteland” finally made it onto the service this past year) and The Bears. Wrapped doesn’t really show that: it’s the top slice of my listening, but doesn’t reflect who I truly am as a music fan, so it’s of limited utility to anyone who might want to try to figure out who I am based on my musical tastes. Except for the very top: Fountains of Wayne truly is my favourite artist, and “Just What I Needed” has been getting me fired up for 45 years now. The algorithm got those right at least.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #41

The Cars – Just What I Needed

Growing up in Cape Breton, punk rock was more a rumour than something we could actually experience. Other than the bits offered up on “90 Minutes With A Bullet”, CBC Radio’s weekly pop music show, it simply wasn’t to be found on local airwaves. I can’t say I was all that broken up by it – those Wednesday night dribs and drabs from the CBC made it clear that, for the 1978 version of me, punk was more something I thought I should like than something I actually did like. Even punk’s housebroken cousin, new wave, wasn’t much of a force in Canadian radio: nothing on this list of RPM’s top 100 songs of the year even remotely qualifies. (That definitely changed the following year.)

The closest thing we had to new wave in 1978 was The Cars’ “Just What I Needed”, but it was more than enough. It wasn’t much of a hit, peaking at #38 nationally, and I don’t recall it doing markedly better in my neighbourhood. But it made it onto CJCB radio at least often enough for me to hear it, and one listen was all it took for me to want the 45. It quickly became – and this is impressive considering everything else happening in pop music that year – one of my most frequently played songs. I would get together with my friend Kirk to play records, and this was the song that would have us bouncing around my living room, in an approximation of what we thought punks might be doing, crashing into furniture and each other, caught up in the energy of the song.

Written by the band’s primary lead singer, Ric Ocasek, I always thought he was singing it, which in retrospect just seems dumb. I learned only a few years ago that the singer was in fact Benjamin Orr, who I knew had sung 1984’s “Drive” but also – and I learned this just now – their 1979 hit “Let’s Go”. Ocasek’s influences in writing the tune included The Velvet Underground and bubblegum band Ohio Express, which makes it kind of odd that he was so defensive about artists being influenced by his song. He accused Fountains of Wayne of sampling it in “Stacy’s Mom”, and forced the destruction of the entire first print run of Car Seat Headrest’s “Teens of Denial” (one of my favourite albums of 2016) after revoking (not without a decent reason, to be clear) his permission to use the song. Ric was a very intense guy when it came to defending his intellectual property. Or maybe it was just part of his prickly personality: his last will and testament disinherited his wife and two of his children.

Of course, it’s only sort of new wave: a better way to describe it is as sneering power pop. The opening guitar stretch (a direct theft, in possibly the most bizarre lift ever, from Ohio Express’ “Yummy Yummy Yummy”) draws you in, simple but pulsating, then amping up by adding just one rich double-pump beat where there had been a single. The opening verse is underlain with straightforward guitar and drum, with the guitar getting more forceful at the end and the bridge between verses taken over by a chilly siren-like synth. The obligatory guitar solo comes at the midpoint of the song, and it serves nicely as a bridge rather than, as is too often the case, dull filler that just delays the song’s proper end from arriving on time. The second half of the song more or less repeats the first, with very little difference, but it never feels like it’s going on too long. This is a begrudging love song (“I don’t mind you comin’ here / And wastin’ all my time”), but “I needed someone to bleed” in the chorus certainly complicates that calculus. When Orr sings “So bleed me” near the end, you can detect that sneer underneath, but I wonder, too, if maybe it’s a shift in power, and the cool narrator now finds himself having let his pursuer get too close.

This has long been a favourite of mine, and Spotify will back me up: it has been consistently among my five most listened to tracks every year since at least 2019. It’s the clear star of my “songs I never skip” list, which includes such delights as Fountains of Wayne’s “Maureen”, Jonathan Coulton’s “Ikea”, “All to Myself” by Marianas Trench and Brand New’s “Jude Law and A Semester Abroad”. It’s a song that was made to be sung along to by hopped up males – the shouting of the title by the backing singers in the chorus works for even the least vocally gifted in a crowd. Something of that vibe can be seen when The Strokes played it live, with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker seeming like a guy at karaoke night being confronted with a song he does not know. Orr and Ocasek are both gone, but they and their band mates left us with at least one immortal tune. There are some other top acts who’ve covered it live – including Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Killers and Eric Church – and every time that opening starts up there is a howl of recognition from the audience. My enduring love for the song may mean I’m in a rut, but I have a lot of company there.