Tag: The Romantics

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 #46

The Romantics – What I Like About You

It’s easy to forget this now, in our world of Shazam and asking Siri about pretty much everything, but not so long ago, it could sometimes be a challenge to find anything out about a random song that you heard. One of the things that drew me to listen to Mike Viola’s music was this line from his Spotify profile: “I’ve spent a lifetime chasing a secret AM radio hit coming out of my mom’s kitchen radio balanced on the windowsill in the summer of 1973.” If you’re part of my generation, you know that feeling. Even in early 1998, when in a feverish haze I heard Fastball do an acoustic version of “The Way” during a radio station visit and thought, “Well, I’ll never hear whatever that was again”. I was happily wrong: by June, it was the song in Canada.

For years, I danced to “What I Like About You” at weddings and bars having no idea who the performer was. I don’t even remember now if I wondered about that at the time. How it ended up on Canadian disc jockey playlists is a mystery, since as best I can tell the song never even charted in this country, and only reached #49 in the U.S. (though it was a massive hit in Australia). 

When I learned it was by The Romantics, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance trying to match this song that I loved with the guys in this video. Not that I didn’t like “Talking in Your Sleep”, which was a Canadian . But the video is just, umm, weird: the first appearance of the band, floating up into the viewfinder like glossy big-haired aliens, is chuckle worthy. And while you can hear the similarities in the two songs once you know it’s the same band, I don’t think you would make that connection unguided. I certainly didn’t.

I don’t think my failure to appreciate that this was a 1979 release is all that odd since the song sounds like something out of the 1960s. The Wikipedia page for the tune lists such influences as The Yardbirds, Chuck Berry and Neil Diamond (!) – you know, acts from the ‘60s. Bob Seger’s 1969 “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” could be this song’s hungover uncle. There is a certain timelessness to the tune, with jangly garage band guitars, hand claps, “Hey!”s and “Uh-huh-huh”s and “Ahhhhhh”s. Pounding but unobtrusive drums provide a steady backbeat, and while there is a guitar solo, it is then immediately upstaged by a harmonica solo, which is so incredibly rock and roll. At one point, it seems to be heading into the fade out, before revving up again, then suddenly ending on one last “Hey!” The song jumps in, does its job, then slips back out in a nifty 2:54.

AllMusic has this great feature that links a record to thematically similar works. The album this tune came from is categorised under Guys Night Out, Late Night and Hanging Out, all of which feel pretty appropriate. Guys Night Out is by far the best match, with tunes that include Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town”, Joe Walsh’s “All Night Long”, Kiss’ “Rock and Roll All Nite”, The Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman”, “I Wanna Be Sedated” from The Ramones, and “Louie Louie” by The Kingsmen. “What I Like About You” fits quite nicely, albeit with a slightly more bubblegum finish. AllMusic missed out though by not having Community Hall Wedding Reception as a theme. What else would be on there? “Don’t Stop Believin’”? “Livin’ on a Prayer”? “Shout” (Isley Brothers, not Tears for Fears)?

There is something about “What I Like About You” that has kept it in the airwaves for over 40 years. It’s the kind of tune that a kid in his bedroom hears and thinks, “I could play that”, and that kid isn’t wrong. I have danced to this song with male and female friends, with a girl I was (secretly) in love with, even with my mother at my stepbrother’s wedding reception. I have soberly danced in my kitchen to this tune, and tapped my toes while sitting on my couch drinking coffee, but it works best when you’re just a little drunk, in a room where there are a few too many people, so that everyone is a bit too warm and starting to run out of steam. It’s at that moment that those opening bars kick in, and everyone feels energised again, ready to take on the night. That might be the key to its longevity: hearing it just makes you, well, happy. And what’s not to like about that?