VIRTUAL MIX TAPE: "13 Wonderful Will Songs, Vol. 9"

Yes, that’s right, it’s time for another installment of songs that I love and that I hope you’ll love, too. And if you don’t, well, it ain’t like this thing is behind the paywall, so what’d you pay for it, anyway?

In conclusion, listen or don’t, but if you do, I hope you dig it…and if you really dig it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription!

1. James, “Waltzing Along” (1997 - Whiplash)

I first discovered these guys when they were on Sire Records and got included in the first two of the label’s seminal Just Say… compilation series, so I was well aware of them by the time they had their brief American breakthrough with the single “Laid,” and—no surprise here—I continued to follow them even after America at large decided that they were going to be a one-hit wonder. This album came out four years after the LP that briefly made them stars of the US airwaves, and it’s too bad more people weren’t listening, because it’s as good as anything they ever released.

2. Richard Thompson, “Persuasion” (2014 - Acoustic Classics)

The first time I heard this song performed with vocals, Richard Thompson wasn’t the one singing it. It was Tim Finn, and it appeared on his 1993 album Before & After. As it happens, however, Thompson had recorded the song as an instrumental a few earlier for the soundtrack of the 1991 film Sweet Talker. I don’t know the story of how Finn happened upon the song and added lyrics to it, I only know that Thompson later reclaimed the track, utilized the lyrics, and made it so much his own that I had to take a second to remember who actually recorded it that way first.

3. Daryl Hall & John Oates featuring Todd Rundgren, “Someday We’ll Know” (2003 - Do It for Love)

Obligatory cover time! And this is one I love to spring on people who’ve never heard it before, because the idea of Hall & Oates teaming with Todd Rundgren to record a New Radicals song is the stuff that pop fans’ wet dreams are made of, and at least as far as I’m concerned, this is just as good in reality as it was in my imagination.

4. Marshall Crenshaw, “You Should’ve Been There” (1989 - Good Evening)

Some folks don’t rate this Crenshaw album as highly as his earlier Warner Brothers work, but it’s the first one I owned that really grabbed me. (To be fair, though, I hadn’t heard his first two WB albums at that point.) This is a track filled with superstars: in addition to backing vocals by the BoDeans, you get Graham Maby of Joe Jackson’s band on bass, Sonny Landreth on slide guitar, and the recently departed David Lindley on steel guitar. It’s a menacing but catchy pop tune.

5. Kirsty MacColl, “Free World” (1989 - Kite)

I’ll never not mourn the loss of Kirsty MacColl at such a young age, but thank heavens she gave us as much great work as she did. My gateway drug into her career was her cover of The Smiths’ “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” which appeared on the soundtrack to She’s Having a Baby, and I spent years in the pre-internet era trying to find anything else by her, but then Kite arrived and made the wait worthwhile. This is a song that I can hold up as a near-perfect pop track, lasting exactly the right length of time and leaving you wanting more.

6. The Big Dish, “Miss America” (1991 - Satellites)

You may recall that I spotlighted Steven Lindsay, former lead singer of The Big Dish, as the obligatory cover a few volumes back (he did the version of The Pixies’ “Monkey Gone to Heaven”), but now you get to hear him fronting the band that initially brought him to fame. This was the first single from the band’s last studio album, and as I feel like I say ever so often, it should’ve been huge. In this case, though, I think you can put the blame on the fact that The Big Dish were shifted from Warner Brothers over to subsidiary East West Records. Sigh…

7. The Rembrandts, “Johnny Have You Seen Her?” (1992 - Untitled)

I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times we spun this album when I was a record store clerk at Tracks. It’s just some seriously catchy pop music, and although it wasn’t a huge hit, this song did end up making it almost halfway up the Billboard Hot 100 before stalling in the 50s. Fortunately, there were greater fortunes to come for The Rembrandts, courtesy of Friends.

8. The Judybats, “Don’t Drop the Baby” (1991 - Native Son)

I actually got a request of sorts to include this band on a volume of “13 Wonderful Will Songs,” but truth be told, I was always going to include a Judybats song, since they’re one of my favorite college-rock bands of the ‘90s. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that frontman Jeff Heiskell is a swell guy. Someday I hope that the band’s last, independently-released album, Judybats ‘00, finally ends up on Spotify. It’s an underheard gem. As for this inclusion, I could’ve gone with a number of different tracks, but this one from their debut LP just seemed to fit sonically into the mix, so here it is.

9. Bourgeois Tagg, “I Don’t Mind at All” (1987 - Yoyo)

As someone who became a diehard Beatles fan in the mid-1980s, I’ve always enjoyed songs that can easily be categorized as “Beatle-esque,” and I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree with putting this track in that category. Brent Bourgeois and Larry Tagg were a great musical duo, and I wish they’d done more together as Bourgeois Tagg, but this Todd Rundgren-produced album is a testament to how great they were, and just for the record, their debut LP is pretty damned good, too.

10. Frente!, “Accidentally Kelly Street” (1992 - Marvin: The Album)

If you looked up the word “twee” in the dictionary, it might well offer up stills from this video, because this song is about as twee as pop songs get. Frente!’s US popularity was basically limited to their cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle,” but this ditty was too catchy for me to ignore.

11. Right Said Fred, “Deeply Dippy” (1992 - Up)

Okay, don’t scoff until you’ve heard it. It’s nothing at all like “I’m Too Sexy.” It’s just a bouncy, goofy little pop song. You might not love it, but there’s scarcely enough there to hate.

12. Saigon Kick, “My Life” (1991 - Saigon Kick)

When I was doing my college internship at RockFlash Magazine in Virginia Beach, I didn’t get any money out of the deal (nor was any promised, it should be noted), but I did ultimately end up getting to take home a bunch of promo CDs that had been sent to the magazine offices, and this was one of them. For a band that looks like you’d need to flip a coin to decide if they were metal or goth, it turns out that they lean toward the former but have a profound appreciation of hooks and harmonies, and nowhere was that more evident on their debut album than on this song.

13. Silverchair, “Across the Night” (2002 - Diorama)

When the Australian band Silverchair burst onto the music scene with their debut album Frogstomp and their hit single “Tomorrow,” I didn’t do much more than shrug, because it really just didn’t do anything for me. Fast-forward to the band’s fourth album, which kicked off with this epic track, and my jaw was on the floor. With a string arrangement by none other than Van Dyke Parks, I instantly developed a new appreciation for Silverchair, and while the band only released one more album after this (2007’s Young Modern), I still follow the work of frontman Daniel Johns, whose sporadic solo efforts have proven that he’s still got a ton of fascinating musical tricks up his sleeve.