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Okay, I’ve been quiet on Facebook for a while, so I think it’s time to flex my song-a-day muscles. This one’s gonna be a little more ambitious, though, so buckle in.

I’ll be talking about hits and trends that I watched happen in the 90s that made me think about earlier music. This will be divided into three sections:

#1 – Giants on the Shoulders of Giants

This will include important songs and artists from the 90s compared with their musical predecessors. In many cases, I will be matching groups that the 90s artists don’t necessarily acknowledge as influences, but they share musical DNA.

#2 – Evolving Artists

This section will be all about how bands change over time – bands that were still active and well-known in the 90s but came from an earlier background. This list will include bands that were still together and artists that went solo or joined other projects.

#3 – Stream of Consciousness

This section will be more about my personal connections to music – songs that made me think of other songs for more free-associative reasons. You may not always see them the same way, but I’ll explain my logic so you can be amused by my connections.

Again, all of this is just about my experience. For those of you who have not seen me do this before, my lists are not meant to be all-encompassing or definitive. It’s just my own musical essay that I want to share.

Oh, and the ambitious part? I’ll be posting two songs per day. I’ll start with the 90s song and then I’ll post the connection in the comments. That’s 62 songs I have prepared for March.

The 90s Through a Gen-X Lens

Day 1 – Nirvana, “Heart Shaped Box” / Faith No More, “We Care A Lot”

For many people, one of the distinct sounds that separates the 90s is grunge. Here was a musical movement that seemed different enough to be considered new, and Nirvana was the biggest driver of that movement’s success.

Although “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was their big commercial breakthrough, I didn’t want to talk about that one because then I’d have to tell the story of how Kathleen Hanna and the Riot Grrrl movement happened simultaneously to Nirvana, but of course did not get the commercial breaks that Nirvana and other (male) grunge acts did. That’s an important story, but not the one I’m telling with this particular essay.

Instead, I want to talk about the geographical migration of musical styles. Often modern music has a vector. It migrates from place to place, morphs slightly, and resurges in popularity as it is rediscovered. Grunge, in many ways, was just the Seattle rediscovery of the California skater-punk movement of the 80s, characterized by bands like Dead Kennedys, Red Hot Chili Peppers (who I’ll talk about later), and the early, Chuck Mosley era of Faith No More.

So Faith No More’s “We Care a Lot” is the lens through which I view Nirvana. Take a listen to both and you’ll see what I mean.

Day 2 – Green Day, “Basket Case” / Dead Milkmen, “Big Time Operator”

When I first heard Green Day’s breakthrough album, “Dookie,” I definitely enjoyed it. I thought it was a good direction for pop-rock to go. But then I heard someone describe it as “punk,” and I was utterly confused.

Punk has never been a meaningful musical description by itself. The Ramones were a punk version of 60s surf-rock, while The Clash incorporated Ska rhythms into their take on punk. But to me, much of the music that carried the punk label through the mid-to-late 90s was even more mainstream than that. Green Day just sounded like part of what they were calling “alternative” in the mid-90s, after that word had become its own meaningless attempt at a genre description.

But I thought about it, and I found the link I had been missing. Ultimately, Green Day was an American pop-punk band, and the legacy that they were building on was not the Sex Pistols or the Clash, it was the Dead Milkmen.

The Dead Milkmen were a mid-to-late 80s punk band that saw little mainstream success. Most people probably only know “Punk Rock Girl.” But if you dive a little deeper into their catalog, you start to see the threads that became the 90s American punk movement.

Unfortunately, there is no good video for my favorite song of theirs – “Instant Club Hit (You’ll Dance to Anything),” but here’s a good taste of their rockabilly punk style.

Day 3 – Alanis Morrisette, “You Oughta Know” / Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time”

Today’s pairing isn’t as much about musical similarity as it is about conceptual similarity. it can be extremely difficult for artists with a broad stylistic range not to be pigeonholed from their first big single.

I didn’t pay enough attention to Jagged Little Pill when it first came out, because I also made assumptions about the whole album and what Alanis Morissette’s music was like based on this song.

I was wrong.

Over time, I have grown in my appreciation for Alanis as a widely-varied artist, and that has allowed me to go back and see this song in context and understand that it highlights her flexibility as well.

Cyndi Lauper is another artist who was pigeonholed by her first single (“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”), but who has amazing talent and an extremely broad palette. Plus, this video has one of the best pre-music openings of its time.

Day 4 – Hole, “Celebrity Skin” / ‘Til Tuesday, “Voices Carry”

Okay, let’s talk for a bit about Courtney Love. Yes, she had lots of problems, especially in the years immediately following Kurt’s death and later in how she treated her daughter. But we don’t often see much discussion of the fact that she was moving in punk circles long before she met Cobain.

Remember Faith No More? Most people think of that band as having a “Chuck Mosley” era and a “Mike Patton” era, but few know that Courtney Love was actually their vocalist for a short time before Mosley joined. That was just one of several projects she worked on during the 80s, years before grunge existed.

And of course, there’s the obscure but amazing spaghetti Western, “Straight to Hell.” In 1987, Love joined other rockers Joe Strummer and Shane McGowan on a party in Spain where they casually filmed a movie.

She knew people. She was connected. Kurt Cobain did not make Courtney Love’s career – she already had one. But of course, many fans of Nirvana in the 90s dismissed her because they thought of her as just “the girlfriend/wife.”

And that attitude leads me to my pairing…

Courtney Love’s mid to late 90s work reminds me of Aimee Mann, and that is a high compliment. Also, the way that Hole was dismissed by a lot of people makes me think specifically of this video.

Day 5 – The Verve, “Bittersweet Symphony” / Boomtown Rats, “I Don’t Like Mondays”

This pairing is probably not going to go the way you expect.

The Verve made some waves, especially with this song, but they had way too much internal strife to survive very long. As with many bands, quite a bit of that strife centered around the lead singer – in this case Richard Ashcroft.

Between line-up changes, legal troubles with the Rolling Stones over this song, and Ashcroft’s push for the spotlight and intermittent solo work, The Verve ended up being a relatively short-lived band, which is a shame because they did make some pretty good music.

And of course, because of all the hubbub surrounding the string loop, you might think that I’m going to pair this song with the original Rolling Stones piece, but I’m not. I’m going to pair it with a band that had similar experiences back in the 80s…

That’s right, the Boomtown Rats, whose relationship with Bob Geldof had a lot in common with The Verve’s relationship with Richard Ashcroft. (Lead singers, amirite?)

Also, I think there’s a lot of similar musical and thematic DNA in these two songs.

Day 6 – Radiohead, “Creep” / The Smiths, “What Difference Does it Make?”

Ah, Radiohead. A moody, British alternative band with strong guitars and a somewhat self-absorbed lead singer – who does that remind me of?

…

It’s The Smiths. Radiohead is basically The Smiths.

Day 7 – Beck, “Loser” / Beastie Boys, “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn”

Today I’d like to take a moment to talk about racism in music promotion. Not necessarily in music itself, although that does happen sometimes, but specifically in how musical styles are marketed, promoted, and popularized.

Throughout the 20th century, music that came out of black communities was criticized, scandalized, and condemned until a white artist came along and made it “acceptable” for white audiences to enjoy it. Benny Goodman with swing, Gershwin with jazz, Elvis with rock, and Abba/The Bee Gees with disco all exemplify this trend.

Beck was not the white artist who popularized hip-hop for white audiences, but he did benefit from the fact that it had already happened. Because the ground was already broken, he could explore his influences more broadly, creating the unique lo-fi, anti-folk sound that made him stand out.

And he did. No shade on Beck himself – he actually did push the envelope in a lot of ways. But it would have been a lot harder for him to go mainstream as quickly as he did if a group from the 80s hadn’t already colonized hip-hop for white people…

Of course I’m talking about the Beastie Boys. In the 80s, there was a stereotypical “rap vs rock” division that pervaded musical culture. RUN-DMC had made an effort to bridge the gap with Aerosmith, but that was just an olive branch. The white mainstream didn’t welcome rap for themselves until the Beastie Boys came along.

This video parodies that division somewhat, but the band was still doing the same thing all those other white artists had done.

Day 8 – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, “Someday I Suppose” / Madness, “House of Fun”

(Apologies – I get a little wordy when talking about the history of Ska.)

The transition into 3rd Wave Ska incorporates several of the things I’ve talked about already – geographic drift, new definitions of punk, and the whitening of musical styles. Of course, the geography and whitening were just a continuation of what had happened with 2nd Wave, so 3rd Wave was not unique in those aspects.

Ska began in Jamaica in the 50s and 60s and was the first truly Jamaican musical style – well before Reggae (which actually came out of Ska). Jamaican emigrants brought the sound to the UK, where it was enthusiastically embraced by some and rejected by others. This rejection had more to do with racial tensions and outright racism than the music itself, which leads us to the 2nd wave.

Efforts to promote racial unity were ingrained into the 2nd Wave Ska (aka 2 Tone) movement, particularly with bands like The Specials and The Beat. Because of this, 2nd Wave is a distinctly British take on Ska, which means that when the sound migrated again, it would have to change once more.

3rd Wave Ska is therefore a more American approach to the genre. 3rd Wave is often lumped together under the term “Ska-Punk,” but that description applies better to some bands than it does to others. The most important thing that happened is that American Ska bands incorporated a variety of distinctly American styles, broadening Ska’s influence even further.

The band that most exemplifies the transition from 2 Tone to Ska-Punk is The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. The 2 Tone influence is strong in their sound, but they also show the drift towards distinctly 3rd Wave elements.

Of all the 2nd Wave bands, the Bosstones most resemble Madness. Their visual aesthetic is basically a Bostonian version of Madness’s dressed-up working class style, and Dicky Barrett is very much a Bostonian version of Suggs.

Day 9 – Garbage, “Only Happy When It Rains” / Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, “I Hate Myself for Loving You”

I think today’s musical pairing is a pretty strong one, so I’m going to steer the discussion into visual aesthetics.

Both of today’s videos feature badass women singing angrily at a camera, but the visuals in these videos are so iconic to their respective decades that they feel very different. This video just looks SO 90s.

Also, I know at least a few people for whom Shirley Manson was an early rockstar crush, and so I wanted to share an early crush from my generation…

I got to see Joan Jett just a couple years ago, and she is still kicking just as much ass at 60. Keep rocking, Joan!

Day 10 – Lisa Loeb, “Stay (I Missed You)” / Suzanne Vega, “Left of Center”

While we’re talking about aesthetics, let’s talk about how Lisa Loeb’s first video has her wearing the most archetypical 90s-college-girl outfit ever. A few years later, she would get much artsier, but her introduction to us was as the mousy student walking around an empty apartment.

Looking back, I can’t remember the timing and whether she was the first one to popularize this look and everyone followed her or if she was riding a trendy wave. Whichever order it happened, variations of this look – leggings under a short, simple dress, big glasses for those who wore them – became fairly common among women in their late teens and early twenties for a few years.

So of course, the pairing for this had to show the same thing for the 80s…

Suzanne Vega did this song for the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, so she channeled Molly Ringwald for the video. Ringwald’s characters, of course, defined late teenage fashion for much of the late 80s.

And look – Vega is also playing in an empty apartment…

Day 11 – Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Scar Tissue” / “Knock Me Down”

My second series of song pairings involves bands or artists paired with themselves to talk about how they changed over time and whether I did or did not appreciate that change.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a long and rocky history. Multiple members in and out of rehab, breakups and reformations, and an early loss to overdose – in many ways the bands resilience has been a testament to the pure stubbornness of its two core members (Flea even more so than Anthony Kiedis).

For many people, your attitude about the band depends greatly on when and how you were introduced to them. Californication was the album where it seemed they had finally grown up a little bit, and “Scar Tissue” is one of the best examples of that.

Certainly John Frusciante’s return was part of that, and many of us are excited to see what they’ll do now that he’s come back again.

My first experience with RHCP was actually as a brief cameo in the 1986 movie Tough Guys. But I really got to know them with Mother’s Milk, the first album with John Frusciante. They were still very much a slam-dance band at that time, so “Knock Me Down” is how I always think of early Chili Peppers.

Day 12 – R.E.M., “Nightswimming” / “Perfect Circle”

R.E.M. has a strange history with its fandom. From their earliest days, fans would claim that each successive album was the point where the band became too mainstream and the music started to go downhill. If you started listening to them in the 90s, you probably heard that it was your favorite album that was the problem, but I can assure you that this was nothing new.

My favorite R.E.M. album is Document. I like most of what came before that, and after it my enjoyment tapers off rapidly. I liked Green, though “Stand” quickly got on my nerves, and I only liked about half of Out of Time. My point of departure was Monster – that was an album that was just too different from the R.E.M. that I liked.

But before that was Automatic for the People, an album that I think might be the exception to this rule for a lot of people. It seems to have broad appeal, acting as sort of a bridge between the pre-Out of Time fans and the post-Monster fans. It has elements of both eras, so everyone can find things they enjoy.

“Nightswimming” always reminds me of some of R.E.M.’s earliest work, specifically in their first full-length album, Murmur. So that’s the pairing that I have for today.

Day 13 – They Might Be Giants, “S-E-X-X-Y” / “(She Was A) Hotel Detective”

hey Might Be Giants went through an interesting (and in some ways challenging) transformation in the 90s, but they definitely emerged from it stronger.

After touring with a full band on the Apollo 18 tour, they decided to move permanently from being a duo to a full band. The EP Why Does the Sun Shine? was their first recording with the full band, and they then went on to record John Henry, an album that was not super well-received.

Factory Showroom was their only other full album of new material in the 90s, and it was much better. Meanwhile, they decided to double-down on their Dial-A-Song and released an entirely digital collection of D-A-S selections. By the time they hit the 2000s, they were back in good form, releasing big albums like Mink Car and The Spine, and also putting out even more children’s music.

So the 90s were a bit of a lull for TMBG, but Factory Showroom remains a standout. I love pretty much everything on this album. I decided to share this particular video because they actually do the weird string ending on Conan, which I enjoy thoroughly.

I also picked it because it lets me set up a pairing that shows how they stuck to their roots even as they added a full band…

Day 14 – U2, “Stay (Faraway, So Close)” / “A Day Without Me”

U2 is another band that went through a dramatic transformation in the 90s. They’d had a bit of transformation previously with the Joshua Tree/Rattle and Hum shift, but the 90s went much further and in a different direction.

Achtung Baby was clearly a reaction to the “American-ness” of the previous albums, but it still had some great new pieces. The band tried to fight back against the criticisms that Rattle and Hum was too pandering, and it seemed to work. It looked like this would be a solid direction for the band…but then the tour happened.

ZooTV became such a monster in its own right. They crossed the US twice – once in arenas and once in outside venues, and then they took it worldwide. Bono became obsessed with his stage personalities like the Mirror Ball Man and Mr. MacPhisto. The flash of the stage production overpowered the music, which was a marked contrast from the very simple staging of the Joshua Tree tour.

That pretentiousness bled into the other albums they released – Zooropa and Pop. The three singles released for Zooropa – “Numb,” “Lemon,” and “Stay (Faraway So Close)” – all show a moodiness and self-importance that the band had started building back in the Rattle and Hum days but had reached a fever pitch in the 90s. Of the three, “Stay” is probably the most interesting as a ballad, but even it feels hollow in both music and message.

THIS is the U2 I grew up with. This is on the War tour, which would end up giving us their breakthrough live album, Under a Blood Red Sky. The song is one of my favorites from their first album, Boy. It still shows Bono’s early tendency to mix covers into the middle of songs (something that would make their LiveAid performance very iconic), but it’s just a nod rather than a whole overblown thing, like performing “Satellite of Love” with a video Lou Reed on the ZooTV tour.

Editor’s note – The last comments refer to a different live video of “A Day Without Me” that is no longer available. But it’s definitely a thing Bono has been doing forever.

Day 15 – Depeche Mode, “Walking in My Shoes” / “Everything Counts”

Depeche Mode also looked pretty different in the 90s from where they had begun, but their evolution was much more gradual and logical.

In the beginning of the 80s, DM was a very young band doing extremely poppy (but also very catchy) hits. With each successive album, they matured a bit and pushed the envelope a little more. By the time they had reached the 1990 album, Violator, we could see how much they had grown up. The 1993 album, Songs of Faith and Devotion just solidified that fact, as you can see in this song.

Interestingly, this gradual shift kept Depeche Mode on the cutting edge of the club scene for nearly two decades. From New Wave to Goth – no matter what was happening, DM always had (and has) a place in the dance mix.

Their 1983 album, Construction Time Again, was the first time Depeche Mode made an obvious push towards more grown up themes and sounds. It definitely has a bit of that “trying a little too hard” look to it, but it’s a pretty good early try. And no one will ever take “Everything Counts” away from me. I have loved this song since I was 12.

Day 16 – Natalie Merchant, “Wonder” / 10,000 Maniacs, “Scorpio Rising”

This sub-section of evolving artists includes artists who either went solo or changed bands from the 80s to the 90s.

Natalie Merchant’s solo career was pretty much inevitable – anyone who was following 10,000 Maniacs closely during the Our Time in Eden era could see it coming. In many ways, she was already behaving like a solo act. When Tigerlily came out in 1995, it just made sense – this is who Natalie was always working towards.

Unfortunately, her timing put this album (and the 1998 Ophelia) in the middle of a veritable boom of solo women artists, many of whom were younger and more susceptible to being shilled by labels and radio stations. For new listeners, Merchant did not stick out as much as, for instance, a Sarah McLachlan. And some 10,000 Maniacs fans wished she had just stayed with them. So Tigerlily, which is much-loved by the people who gave it a shot, was more of an “adult radio” success than a pop success.

This is a shame, because it really shows off just how much Natalie’s voice had grown. Here is a woman at the height of her craft – she has lost nothing of the power of her youth but has gained all the confidence and control of maturity.

Day 17 – björk, “army of me” / The Sugarcubes, “Motorcrash”

Many people think of Björk as a solo act, because how could an imagination like that be contained by a band? But it’s true – Björk began her musical career as part of The Sugarcubes, a band she and her then-husband helped form.

Although that relationship and the band broke up in the early 90s, Björk had much more music to give. “Army of Me” is off of her second solo album, Post. Not only did it jump onto the charts immediately, but it has been used in multiple movie soundtracks (sometimes in remix or cover form).

If you’ve never had a chance to listen through the original Sugarcubes album, Life’s Too Good, you should definitely do so. It’s fantastic. And consider how it sounded at the time, in a world that had never heard Björk’s voice before, and barely knew that Iceland could produce pop music.

Day 18 – Annie Lennox, “Walking on Broken Glass” / Eurythmics, “Would I Lie to You?”

Annie Lennox’s first solo album (in 1992) was called Diva, which is rather on the nose, but apt. Lennox is one of my favorite divas of all time. I think she’s allowed a bit of self-promotion.

Lennox’s solo sound was a little different without Eurythmics partner Dave Stewart, but her powerful voice shines through everything she does, so you barely notice.

I don’t have much else to say today. Just enjoy!

Day 19 – Cracker, “Low” / Camper Van Beethoven, “Good Guys and Bad Guys”

I end the evolving artists section with two projects by singer David Lowery. Lowery has an incredibly distinctive voice, such that, despite sharing no other band members, when I first heard Cracker I was inordinately excited because I thought it was new work by Camper Van Beethoven.

Alas, it was not. Cracker was a bit more serious in tone (almost everything is more serious than Camper Van Beethoven), but Lowery’s vocals still make their songs stick out for me.

If you’ve heard anything by CVB, it’s probably “Take the Skinheads Bowling” or “Eye of Fatima.” If that’s all you’ve ever heard, I recommend tracking down their debut album, Telephone Free Landslide Victory, and just spending a day getting into it.

Unfortunately, YouTube is lacking in videos with good-quality audio from that album, but “Good Guys” is still very much in their earlier style.

Day 20 – Eve 6, “Inside Out” / John Parr, “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)”

And now we enter the third section, the stream of consciousness selections. From here to the end, my pairings will be much less linear. I’ll try to explain why I made these connections, but I don’t expect everyone to agree with me.

Let’s start with one of the catchiest songs of the late 90s. To me, this song always feels like it belongs on a movie soundtrack. It was featured in 1998’s Can’t Hardly Wait and then an episode of Charmed the next year, but I’m not sure it actually has that strong association for other people. For me, though, it just feels like something that should be playing over the end credits for every late-90s/early-00s teen movie.

And of course, when I think of teen movie soundtracks, this is what jumps out at me: one of the greatest movie themes of the 80s.

Day 21 – Smashing Pumpkins, “Today” / The Violent Femmes, “Kiss Off”

This pairing was inevitable. From the moment Smashing Pumpkins burst onto the scene with their 1993 breakthrough album, Siamese Dream, I have had one and only one association. It’s one that has stuck with me for thirty years, and now I finally get to talk about it.

Billy Corgan’s vocal style is quite unique. It seems like the sort of thing no one else could do, except that when I heard it, I recognized it immediately. You see, there was another band that I already identified with that vocal style…

Yep, it’s Gordon Gano of Violent Femmes.

Day 22 – No Doubt, “Just A Girl” / Devo, “Girl U Want”

Okay, this pairing requires a little explanation, because it seems really superficial at first, but there’s more to it than you think. On the surface, it looks like all I did was match two songs that share a lyric and some similar guitar stylings, but they share something more important than that:

Tank Girl.

You see, the “Just a Girl” video came out late in late 1995, and it was the band’s (and Gwen Stefani’s) major breakthrough. Earlier that year, the Tank Girl movie had been released. I mention that because Stefani’s look and attitude in this video is absolutely channeling Lori Petty, and I don’t think that’s an accident. If Tank Girl had come out just a few years later, I could see Stefani playing the lead, or at least being on the soundtrack.

But what song DOES play on the opening credits of Tank Girl? It’s Devo’s “Girl U Want.”

Bam. Pairing established.

Day 23 – Portishead, “Numb” / Siouxie and the Banshees, “Spellbound”

Being goth in the 90s was an interesting blend of old and new. There was a lot of music that we had grown up on that formed what I might call the core of the 90s goth experience, but there were also new bands that managed to crystallize what we enjoyed about that older music and combine it with how we felt about now being young adults.

Portishead was one of those bands.

For me, this song epitomizes how it FELT to be goth. And so I pair it with an earlier song that also conveys that feeling. These two songs have somewhat different moods, but they are both very much about the goth attitude.

Day 24 – Sarah McLachlan, “Hold On” / Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill”

In many ways, the 90s were the decade of Sarah McLachlan. From massively popular singles to Lilith Fair to almost ubiquitous presence on teen TV soundtracks, she was everywhere.

Like anyone who becomes that omnipresent that quickly, some people did become a little overloaded on her, but there is no denying that she was incredibly talented. This is one of my favorite songs off of the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy album, which is the album most people consider her breakthrough. (I actually like Solace a little better, but they’re both great.)

As far as pairing goes, I think Sarah’s sound has at least a bit of similarity to Kate Bush, and the fact that both of these videos involve a lot of dancing certainly doesn’t hurt the comparison.

Day 25 – Pearl Jam, “Corduroy” / Hoodoo Gurus, “Bittersweet”

Grunge was not necessarily a monolith, and when it comes to Nirvana vs Pearl Jam, I definitely fall more on the Pearl Jam side. I like the flow of their songs better, I like their tonal variety, and I generally preferred their lyrics.

But I also think part of that is the neo-hippie vibe. The 90s had a weird hippie legacy, with a variety of bands and festivals adopting the look and feel of the late 60s to mixed success. (Remember Woodstock ’94? The very definition of mixed success.)

I think Pearl Jam did hippie-grunge very well, and their look and sound was a good example of how to update something without clinging too much to nostalgia.

This vibe is also part of what leads me to the pairing – an underrated Australian band from the 80s that definitely did the hippie look but with an updated sound. And their sound definitely suggests some influence on Pearl Jam…

If you’ve never heard of the Hoodoo Gurus, I highly recommend taking a deep-dive. There’s some amazing stuff there.

Day 26 – Rusted Root, “Back to the Earth” / Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, “Tomorrow People”

As soon as Rusted Root released “When I Woke,” literally every percussion major at Northwestern had a copy of that CD. And with good reason – their percussion work is spectacular. If you’re into percussion, you should definitely spend some time with this album.

Rusted Root was also part of a 90s boom in “World Music,” a movement that was partially driven by actual international musicians (often on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label) and partially by American and British musicians suddenly deciding they were expert ethnomusicologists. This is more of that “mixed success” of the hippie revival I mentioned yesterday.

Still, I think Rusted Root made some amazing music, and they’re definitely worth a listen.

If there is an 80s version of this, it’s probably the reggae revival that was spawned by the 1984 release of Legend, a compilation album of Bob Marley and the Wailers.

I got into reggae pretty thoroughly in middle school, and I even got to go see the Melody Makers at the NY State Fair. (That was my first true awareness that people smoked pot at outdoor concerts.)

Day 27 – Barenaked Ladies, “It’s All Been Done” / Huey Lewis and The News, “If This Is It”

Is there a more universal, ubiquitous sound of the 90s than Barenaked Ladies? It didn’t matter if you loved them, liked them, or loathed them, you definitely heard them. Constantly.

I did like them, but I also preferred the songs that didn’t get played constantly. If you have only ever heard their singles and TV show themes and haven’t listened all the way through one of their albums, you should try going through an album and skipping the songs you already know. You may be surprised at the variety and depth.

Barenaked Ladies has sort of a big band rock sound that I like to joke would have been a ska band if they had ever heard any ska. But that big band rock sound actually has a different legacy, a legacy that is indeed shared by a band from the 80s that was just as ubiquitous…

After some careful consideration, I have decided that Barenaked Ladies are the 90s, Canadian version of Huey Lewis and The News. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Day 28 – Dave Matthews Band, “Ants Marching” / Talking Heads, “This Must Be the Place”

Dave Matthews Band would later have a…variety of issues, but their debut release, Under the Table and Dreaming, showed great promise. While they intersected with some of the popularity of Blues Traveler, I feel the writing and orchestration on this album is vastly superior to that band.

That orchestration is a big part of what led me to this pairing. I feel that DMB is a great example of an eclectic sound that can emerge when musicians collaborate across a broader range of genres. I have always loved “Ants Marching” particularly because of the drums/bass blend and the interplay between sax and fiddle (as well as how the violin itself changes tone back and forth between fiddling and more classical violin).

This reminded me of one of the greatest bands of the 70s and 80s, another eclectic East Coast group, one that constructed songs as an art…

I know some Talking Heads fans might object to my comparing them to DMB, but I think that Dave Matthews Band at their best have echoes of Talking Heads. They may not have been as innovative, but they both made some quality music.

Day 29 – Len, “Steal My Sunshine” / The Go-Gos, “Vacation”

We’re coming to the end of the month, so I’m leaning towards the end of the 90s. Here’s one of the catchiest trash one-hit wonders of the decade, rivaling Cotton Eye Joe and Blue.

And perhaps, as our sunshine is indeed stolen from us, this is a vibe we all need right now. And I’ve paired it with a song that has almost the exact same vibe from nearly two decades earlier…

Thanks to Spider-Man: Far From Home for putting this song back into everyone’s consciousness. The Go-Go’s deserve more credit and awareness than they often get.

Day 30 – Weezer, “Undone – The Sweater Song” / XTC, “Making Plans for Nigel”

I have to say, I was never really into Weezer. Over time, I’ve managed to get to a point where I can enjoy some of their songs, but their songwriting has always seemed a bit lazy to me.

They have an air of artificiality about them, a constructed sense of nostalgia for a time that never really existed. I think it comes down to the fact that I was too old when I discovered them, and I didn’t buy it.

But when I think about my own musical upbringing, I can find a similar effect for myself. A lot of my early Anglophilic music listening came out of that fascination for exactly the same thing – a reflection of a culture I had not experienced and could not know the truth of.

So for this pairing, I have chosen a song that I was into LONG before I ever understood it…

This is such an iconic song about a uniquely British experience of the late 70s. I just thought it was catchy and a bit amusing. I get it now, but I was well into adulthood when I really examined it.

Day 31 – Blink 182, “All the Small Things” / Tubeway Army, “Are Friends Electric?”

Although the single and video for this song came out in early 2000, the album Enema of the State was released in the middle of 1999, so I’m putting this at the tail end of my list.

Part of the reason for this is that Enema of the State in general and this song in particular feel much more 00s than 90s. This album was very influential on pop music, and it helped define much of the pop sound of the following decade. Blink-182 heralded the aughts.

In my pairing, I went back and looked at the many things that heralded the 80s. Going back to one of the ideas I talked about originally, a lot of what we think of as the 80s sound started in England in the late 70s and then drifted over through New York (particularly CBGB’s). Much of the American electronic music was still very disco at the time, so I wanted to find something that really showed the birth of New Wave in an unfiltered form…

Before Gary Numan released “Cars” to much American acclaim, he was already heavily influential on the emerging English New Wave. There’s no question that Tubeway Army would have influence on bands like Human League and Thompson Twins, bands that defined the early 80s.

I also like the fact that both Gary Numan and Blink-182 are pushing the facial-piercing envelope for their time.