Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ sophomore album, You’re Gonna Get It!, was released in 1978, between the band’s 1976 debut album and 1979’s classic Damn the Torpedoes.
As such, it suffers a bit from middle child syndrome, and was received rather tepidly by critics. It produced two singles, ‘Listen to Her Heart‘ and ‘I Need to Know.’
Elvis Costello and the Attractions recorded this cover of Yoko Ono’s ‘Walking On Thin Ice’ for a 1984 Yoko tribute album titled Every Man Has a Woman.
It was later released on Costello’s compilation Out of Our Idiot and finally on the reissue of Punch the Clock, where I first heard it. It’s pretty great.
It’s always a treat when a Toad the Wet Sprocket song pops up on Random Weekends. With so much else to listen to, it’s too seldom that I fire up their albums on my own.
This song comes from Toad’s 1997 album Coil, their fifth, and their last before a reunion album 16 years later.
I recently saw the film Blinded by the Light, a movie about a young Pakistani teen in London who finds creative salvation in the music of Bruce Springsteen. It’s a lovely, uplifting film that really understands the mind-blowing phenomenon of discovering an artist who speaks to your very core.
It also made me want to dig up some old Bruce Springsteen albums and pay my respects, though I haven’t gotten around to that just yet.
Here’s a track from David Byrne’s 2001 album Look Into the Eyeball, a record that represents the moment my fandom started to wane.
Prior to this, Byrne has released a string of four great solo albums between 1989 and 1997, culminating with Feelings, the best of them. That period also found me in my late teens and early 20s, a prime musical discovery zone.
I went five years between She & Him songs on Random Weekends, posting the first back in 2014 and the second earlier this month. Now, just three weeks later, the duo shows up again.
Little surprises like this that go hand-in-hand with mathematical randomness are the most satisfying part of Random iTunes Weekends. I love the anomalies and clusters that inevitably pop up when you repeatedly spin the wheel.
This is my sixth track from Tim McGraw’s 2002 album Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors. Three of them appeared on Random Weekends while the rest were planned.
This very solid album is my favorite record by a male country music artist who isn’t Brad Paisley or Jason Isbell. I think that’s enough qualifiers, though I might be forgetting somebody.
