a compendium of albums turning 30 in 2024 part 3
a collaborative effort celebrating the albums of 1994
Welcome back for Part 3.We've got some really excellent stuff for you today. Part 1, Part 2.
They Might Be Giants - John Henry by Stephen Lopez
Hello. My name is Steve, and I’m a weezer-holic. I play in a Weezer tribute band. I called a local radio station to request their music so much in the 90s that they dubbed me “weezersteve” and the moniker has stuck with me to this day. I have multiple 3-ring binders in my basement filled with detailed analysis of their music and printed copies of conversations from Weezer message boards, IRC channels, and email listservs... and that’s why I’m here to write about They Might Be Giants.
Like so many others my age (the somewhat forgotten Late-Gen Xers / Elder Millennials born from ’79-81) our first introduction to TMBG was not their groundbreaking first albums of the 80s, but instead it was thanks to the geniuses at Warner Brothers who used two of the songs from 1990’s masterpiece album Flood as the soundtrack to two animated shorts in a 1991 episode of Tiny Toon Adventures. I was only 11 years old and - despite their music being used in cartoons - TMBG was actually making legitimate adult music, with adult lyrics and themes (contrary to what the general population might believe - and ignoring the fact that they later literally made children’s music). It wasn’t until high school (’93-’97) when I grew to develop my own musical tastes (thank you, ahem weezer) and really sunk my teeth into the music that TMBG was releasing.
However, I came to 1994’s John Henry late. Like pretty much everyone on the planet, I am certain that the music which came out while I was a teenager is The Best Music Ever Made™️, and John Henry is no exception. However, my brain was crammed so full of music in high school that I just didn’t have the capacity to keep up with TMBG. I was barreling forward toward an eventual degree in Music Education and so not only was I spending hours every night playing guitar along to new Weezer, Green Day, and Soundgarden albums, but I was also spending hours every day playing trumpet, singing in choir, and other generally “less cool” musical activities.
Rochester, NY is incredibly lucky to have an independent listener-supported radio station (WBER) which isn’t beholden to the whims of the music industry. For example, they’ll play deep cuts from TMBG albums long after their release. In this specific case it was some time in the late-90s, four to five years after John Henry was released, when I remember hearing a song on WBER with a lyric that made me literally laugh out loud:
“I got a ride home with a drunk guy. How ungrateful I must have seemed.”
The song was “Sleeping In The Flowers,” a classic John Flansburgh jam that showcases what makes John Henry such a turning point in the band’s career - it was the first time they used a full band in the studio, rather than just the two Johns performing everything with the help of tape machines, synthesizers, and samplers. The song featured the kind of dark wit that They Might Be Giants had already perfected when they debuted in 1986, but I just wasn’t old enough for it to click with me at the time.
This album is the sound of a band taking full advantage of a major label budget at a time when the labels were not afraid to front absurd amounts of money to a band for their recording budget in the hopes that those costs would eventually be recouped by album sales (ignoring, of course, the fact that those deals were almost always robbing the bands themselves of ultimately making money in the process). TMBG took that budget and proceeded to release a 20-song, nearly 60-minute album, which both honors their past and charts the course for their long and successful future. Hooks and hilarious quips abound, surrounded by lush harmonies (“I Should Be Allowed To Think”), lavish horn arrangements (“No One Knows My Plan”), and even some genuine hard-rock songs (“A Self Called Nowhere”). And yet, in true TMBG fashion, they still find a way to slip in some absurdism (“O, Do Not Forsake Me”), historical tributes (“Meet James Ensor”), and even a song with lyrics pulled almost entirely from the titles of Alice Cooper songs (“Why Must I Be Sad?”).
John Henry isn’t just one of my favorite albums from what I consider to be one of the best years in music history, but it’s also my favorite TMBG record of them all (with all due respect to Flood, which is an album that I’d rank among the greatest of all time, from any artist). If you’ve ever written off TMBG in the past as a band that makes silly music… well… you’re not wrong… but I implore you to listen to John Henry and give the band another chance. Music doesn’t always need to be So Serious™️ and TMBG are arguably the best band in history at writing songs that can give you a hearty chuckle, subtly teach you a lesson, and maybe even give your heartstrings a gentle tug.
You can find Steve as @steelopus pretty much everywhere online. Links to his various music projects can be found here.
Smashing Pumpkins - Pisces Iscariot by Adam Michael
Discovering new music in the 1990’s often meant finding a local radio station that played your preferred genre of music and letting the sweet sounds wash over you between commercial breaks. MTV was also an option if your family or friends were fortunate enough to have cable.
Beyond that, once you had identified an artist you liked it was off to the record store to pick up their album or if you were lucky, find out they had several available that you were unaware of.
The first time I heard the sweet tones of the Smashing Pumpkins was over the radio. It stopped me in my tracks. Billy Corgan’s vocals and the band’s unique sound was something I had never heard before. I needed more. I remember borrowing the Siamese Dream CD from a friend and having it on constant rotation. I remember another friend at school getting Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and being super jealous. Just the artwork for the album itself was magical and at that point I had only heard a few songs from that album that were played on the radio.
I didn’t discover Pisces Iscariot until after MCIS was already out. I was out at a record store browsing the music and was floored to see they had an album I didn’t know about. 14 new songs! New to me anyways. I bought it and rushed home to give it a listen.
To my delight, this album of songs that didn’t make the cut for Siamese Dream stood on their own as another incredible work I was ready to play on repeat. It still blows me away they had an album of b-sides that they could just put out there and it would stand up against any other artists work at that time. As I had come to expect from them, there was the soft, the sweet, the angst, and the defiance that I had so appreciated from their other albums. It’s all there. Soaring guitar solos, the Pumpkins brand of guitar distortion, the beautiful acoustic arrangements, and Jimmy Chamberlin giving each song he played on exactly what it needed.
Like their other albums, this felt like a trip to listen to all the way through. Soothe opens the album with just Billy and an acoustic guitar. Immediately after you’re hit with the crunch of distorted guitars with a phaser pedal. Billy sings, “Hey! Now listen here!” And you can’t help but be drawn in. Off on some magical, musical journey that was taking me somewhere off of this earth. I have the album on now as I’m writing this and it still holds up. It’s hard to pick a favorite song off of the work here. Fan favorites are probably Starla and the cover of Landslide. I’ve argued with friends that the cover surpasses the original. If any cover holds a candle to the og it’s this one and only Billy could pull it off. For me, the punch of the distorted guitars, Billy Corgan’s snarling vocals, along with Jimmy’s drumming on Hello Kitty Kat make that the stand out for me. The solos rip their way through the end of that song with the punch of Jimmy powering it through. Whir has grown on me over time as a softer song that feels whimsical and closes out with a beautiful outro that escorts you off to the next song. As if the album wasn’t enough of a ride, Spaced closes it out with what feels like an ascension to the heavens. The subtle drumming, silky smooth guitars with slight delay just send you home to somewhere other than here.
It accomplishes what all good albums should. It should be a trip. It should take you away from everything else around you. It should draw you in and stay with you. Pisces Iscariot does all of that and continues to lift me high, even all these years later.
Adam Michael can be found on twitter at @thebaldemperor.
Mark Lanegan - Whiskey For the Holy Ghost by David Dubose
I remember a lot of rain, a lot of hills, and a lot of driving. My copy of the album is a used CD from the record shop in the town I lived in years ago, where I used to wander and browse the one or two good stores and coffee shops, before most of them shut down. That CD came along with me in several different cars, through the chaos of work, driving to jobsites, crisscrossing three or four states, through hills, rain, and wind, traffic, potholes, and dirt, dead-straight highways and offroad through bushes. The days were long and hard, sampling contaminated groundwater at old gas stations and fuel terminals, hauling gear through woods or highway medians, drilling wells to get to the water, fixing the treatment systems that clean the water. Everywhere I took it, it just fit. It’s not rock, it’s not country, it’s not folk, but it’s somehow all of it. Dark skies and cold mornings. Desolation and isolation. Hard living and short-lived hidden-away bright spots. It sounded like an invitation to come in and rest but maybe not stay for too long, because the road is calling again.
And that voice, there’s always that voice. Everyone who writes about Lanegan writes about his iconic gruff and gravelly voice (they always say “gravelly”), and, well, I will too. It was equal parts heavy blanket and rusted sledgehammer, whatever you needed, whether you knew it or not. He could croon and he could howl and he could do them both at the same time.
In 1994, his band Screaming Trees were in the process of collapsing, to put out their final album in 1996. But Mark was already forging his own way as an alt-rock troubadour, having released his solo debut The Winding Sheet in 1990. He would go on to growl and sneer with Queens of the Stone Age, standing solid like an oak tree on stage, his hands never moving from their spots on the mic stand, leaving his words hanging in the air still smoldering as the riffs danced and kicked around underneath them. He would also go on to hum and swing with Isobel Campbell on spare folk ballads you had to strain to hear, words bouncing gently off the corners of dimly-lit rooms.
Everywhere in between, he was always writing, always singing, always looking for that next thing and not caring where he might find it. I always come back to Whiskey for the Holy Ghost as The Lanegan album. Whatever it was he spent his life looking for, this one feels the most like a mission statement for how he was going to keep looking.
It was hard work being on the road all the time all those years ago, but it was a step up from my previous job in the oil field, living in trailers on well sites or a rented company house in the biggest town nearby (population 2,900). I had to learn to appreciate a long drive as something beautiful and fleeting: a moment of peace among the chaos. Mark had seen some shit and kept on living, kicking through the muck and finding solid ground on the other side, even if it didn’t stay solid for long. The long road was peaceful but it was still long. I hadn’t seen all the same shit Mark had (mercifully), but I found plenty of muck that I had to kick through. It felt nice to have someone along for company.
The first song, “River Rise,” opens with an eerie wind and formless whistling over a plinking music box, conjuring the image of a lonely but content hermit staring out the window of an old attic, just tinkering. Then the rolling major-key guitar line comes in like a sunrise. His voice rises and falls through cymbal crashes and nearly breaks trying to shout down an encroaching cruel day here on earth, before settling into a low rumble of resignation: “there’s nothing else I can do.”
Every day is a journey, and every journey has the chance to end in some place you don’t want to be. But what if it doesn’t? It took me a long time to realize that ending up in a bad place isn’t the end of the road, it means the road is longer than I thought. So turn up the music and keep driving.
There are twelve more songs on the album, twelve more journeys. Slow burns reflecting on sorrow and dread, devils and whiskey (sometimes one and the same). Apologies for lost love. Thankfulness for the gift of another day undeserved. Surreal retellings of long-lost folk tales that may never have existed. All wrapped up in warm melodies, dark melodies, brooding acoustic guitars, hints of buzzing electric twang, a violin and a saxophone. Everything in its proper place, right where you wouldn’t think to look. More than anything, it leaves you with a feeling that you have now traveled somewhere you didn’t know you wanted to go.
Even that oil field job was a step up from the wreckage of a former life I had left behind. I had to escape to get a clean start and see clearly and find where I needed to be. When I left the newest pile of wreckage from that job, I finally had a direction, and there she was waiting for me to come home.
Somewhere in the desolation and isolation there is hope. It’s the kind you have to dig for, but once you’ve found it, when you’ve worked for it, it will stay with you. It gets easier to hold onto because now you’ve got practice wrestling it – you can hold it tighter when it tries to get away. And once you’ve got that hope in the darkness, you can carry it with you like a little light, where someone else – lost and stumbling – can see it and come find you. Then you’ll hear it, that voice, beckoning you back into the woods, where there’s always an open seat at the campfire.
And when you’re ready, you can get back on the road.
D is a geologist in Atlanta. He writes A Hole in the Ground (TheDadRock.substack.com) about kids, chaos, rocks, and college football (sometimes all at once!). He is also mostly a fly on the wall on Twitter (@thedadrock1) and Bluesky (thedadrock1.bsky.social).
Back tomorrow with three more albums. Hope you are enjoying these essays as much as I am.