Tag Archives: Decades

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Song of the Day #4,947: ‘I’ll Wait’ – Van Halen

Here’s an album that would have been a better fit last week, in that I’m very familiar with the hit singles but less so with the rest of the album. I couldn’t find room for it there, but I certainly wasn’t going to exclude an album that is named after the year I’m covering.

Van Halen’s 1984 was the hard rockers’ sixth album, and remains tied with their self-titled debut as their top seller. Powered by hit singles ‘Jump,’ ‘Panama,’ and ‘Hot For Teacher,’ the record sold more than 10 million copies in the U.S. and spent five weeks at #2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, kept from the top spot by Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

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Song of the Day #4,946: ‘Sixteen Blue’ – The Replacements

I’ve long seen The Replacements’ 1984 album Let It Be lauded as one of the best alternative rock albums of all time, but I’d never listened to it closely enough to test that theory.

The band had released three albums of loud, reckless punk before lead singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg decided to try his hand at some songs with actual structure and melody. The result was this 11-track collection that features some softer, more contemplative songs among all the thrash.

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Song of the Day #4,945: ‘Middle of the Road’ – The Pretenders

Before now, I’d never heard a Pretenders album all the way through. I finally made the leap with Learning to Crawl, the latest album I’m including in my ‘Decades’ exploration of the year 1984.

Learning to Crawl was the rock band’s third album, and their first with a new lineup, after two of the original four members died of drug overdoses. Lead singer/songwriter Chrissie Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers eventually enlisted guitarist Robbie McIntosh and bassist Malcolm Foster to flesh out the band for the album’s recording. But first, another duo recorded the single ‘Back On the Chain Gang’ backed with ‘My City Was Gone,’ two songs that would number among the band’s most popular.

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Song of the Day #4,942: ‘Hello Again’ – The Cars

Every time I hear a song by The Cars, I vow to dig deeper into the band’s work. Their New Wave power pop sound is right up my alley.

1984 saw the release of The Cars’ fifth studio album, Heartbeat City. The album spawned six successful singles, including the band’s all-time biggest hit, ‘Drive,’ as well as two other MTV staples in ‘You Might Think’ and ‘Magic.’ That trio of songs defined the mid-80s for my tween self as much as anything I’m featuring in this Decades installment.

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Song of the Day #4,941: ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ – U2

My first real exposure to U2 came with their 1987 smash The Joshua Tree. That’s an album I knew by heart start to finish, and from then on I made a point to own everything they released.

That amounted to just nine albums over the next 34 years. The most recent three are all pretty forgettable, but the six released between 1988 and 2004 are genre-defining (and sometimes genre-defying) works of art.

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