How Good It Is
333 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 23 ratingsEvery week I choose a song from the 50s through the 80s and dive into its history, the story behind the song and other items of interest. Find more stuff at www.howgooditis.com
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Episodes
173: Wichita Lineman
January 18, 2024 06:11 - 15 minutes - 13.3 MBBy 1968, Glen Campbell had moved from session musician to a star in his own right. His single "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," written by Jimmy Webb, was a huge hit for him. So when Campbell decided he needed another song, he turned back to Webb and asked him for another song. For whatever reason, he asked Webb to make it a song about a specific location. Webb, at that time, was in the business of writing as many songs as possible about his ex, a woman named Susan Horton. (Coincidentally, Jim...
172: A World War Two Christmas
December 26, 2023 04:34 - 23 minutes - 18.9 MBMerry Christmas to those who celebrate! Today we're looking at three Christmas songs that are born from the anxieties of World War Two. Two of the songs aren't direct references to the war itself, but it clearly informed the subject. Themes of separation and loneliness emerge, and a sense of nostalgia is present throughout. Interestingly, one of the songs was so dark that the lyricist was asked to change the words...twice. For the other two songs, there's a verse that usually goes unsung, t...
171: Save the Last Dance For Me
December 23, 2023 01:59 - 16 minutes - 14.1 MB...before we were so rudely interrupted... This is a song that I'm long-overdue in covering, if only because of the backstory it has. It's simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking. It's a love letter from lyricist Doc Pomus to his wife. That's not unusual, of course. Many songwriters compose songs dedicated to a loved one. But this one has an extra special twist to it. I shan't spoil it here, though: you'll have to actually listen to the show. So in this episode we'll learn about the...
170: I Fought the Law
September 21, 2023 08:20 - 15 minutes - 12.9 MBHow many times now have I gone into the backstory with a song and learned that the person who wrote it says something akin to, "Yeah, I knocked that one off in about fifteen minutes." Oftentimes they also think that the song isn't going to amount to very much, which I find kind of funny. But it also supports a working theory I have that it's not always the song itself, but the way it's presented. The Crickets (sans Buddy Holly) and a few others approached it one way, but Bobby Fuller and The...
169: Tiny Dancer
August 13, 2023 19:59 - 20 minutes - 16.8 MBI don't often play favorites on this show; in fact there have been a couple of songs I genuinely disliked, but I covered them anyway because the story behind them was kind of interesting. And I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify those songs, because I do try to be even-handed. However. I am going to take the time to gush about "Tiny Dancer" just a little bit, because it's one of my favorite songs by Elton John, and it may even be somewhere in my all-time Top Ten, if I took the time to ...
168: Windy
August 02, 2023 00:27 - 5 MBThe Association was a band that just kind of floundered for awhile. First in was in their early years when they were known as simply The Men, then, in 1966 after their first album did well, the second one did...not so much. Bones Howe Part of the problem, it seemed, is that the band members playing their own instruments was mostly not a good idea. So for their third album, Warner Brothers (which had purchased The Association's label and therefore their contract) brought in a new producer. T...
167: Without You
July 06, 2023 04:12 - 20 minutes - 17 MBOne of my favorite titles for an album comes from The Animals. They did a bunch of albums up to 1969, then for a year or two there were a couple of compilation albums after they broke up. But in 1977 the Animals reunited and released a new album, titled Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted. I don't know what made me think of that. Anyway. (heh.) This was one of those episodes where, the more I found, the more there was TO find. And so what I thought would be a relatively short episode clo...
166: Daydream Believer
April 10, 2023 17:57 - 13 minutes - 10.9 MBI think that by now the Monkees have overcome their epithet of "Prefab Four," which I suppose was clever but not especially accurate. At least three of the Monkees were musicians who could act. I'd argue that Micky Dolenz was an actor who could play music. (More on that below.) Having said that, however, he's got one of the best voices of the rock and roll era, so my label comes from the fact that he came from acting rather than from music, as the others did. That they didn't write most of t...
165: If You Could Read My Mind (featuring Mike Messner)
February 19, 2023 00:32 - 33 minutes - 27.2 MBYou might remember a few episodes back when I teamed up with Mike Messner. He's the host of the Gordon Lightfoot appreciation podcast Carefree Highway Revisited. Well, Mike is back, and this time around we're talking about Lightfoot's first big American hit, "If You Could Read My Mind." I actually went looking around for the album that I'd first heard this song on, and it turned out that I was exactly correct about its title: This was a four-album box set that came out in 1973, so clearly t...
164: Chinese Food on Christmas
December 31, 2022 05:15 - 52 minutes - 42.1 MBTo be honest, I didn't really expect both of the musicians I approached this year to be both very open to the idea of an interview and so generous with their time. But I'm definitely glad that they were, especially because you get to benefit from the chats I had with them. And during this holiday season you get two long episodes instead of one semi-long one. Win-win all around! Brandon Walker's "Chinese Food on Christmas" isn't as Baltimore-centric as David DeBoy's song is, but it definitely...
163: Crabs for Christmas
December 27, 2022 04:56 - 54 minutes - 44.6 MBOver the last several years, radio stations have been snapped up by large corporations. Then, as a cost-cutting measure, certain functions have been centralized. One of these has been the stations' playlists, the literal list of songs that a station has in its rotation. This has led to a homogenization of radio stations and it kind of makes them not as much fun to listen to when you travel. That said, there are going to be variations to the playlists depending on requests and local tastes. Fo...
162: Reach Out (I’ll Be There)
October 27, 2022 04:40 - 11 minutes - 10.4 MBSuch a life I've had lately, what with getting Covid and then getting part of the house renovated...four weeks of a two-week project. And the job isn't even done, but that's not the contractor's fault. (Replacement parts, don'tcha know.) And for some reason it's taking forever to put the kitchen—the whole downstairs, really—back together. Anyway. This episode takes a peek at the song that arguably became the Four Tops' signature hit. The funny thing is, none of the Tops thought it would...
161: Stagger Lee
September 08, 2022 19:27 - 18 minutes - 15.4 MBIf you haven't been paying attention (and, based on the download statistics, you haven't), I'm part of a second podcast, where I take on more of a support role than as the lead voice. The show is called Words and Movies, in which my partner Sean Gallagher and I choose a pair of films and find the links between them. In an upcoming episode, we discuss a film from 2007 called Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover. There's a scene involving Glover's character and a blind musician played by Keb' ...
160: Failing Upward, Vol 2
August 01, 2022 13:04 - 10 minutes - 8.96 MBPardon my allergies; I've sounded kind of rough for a week or so. There was a lot of throat-clearing to edit out of this one. I can't even blame the Southern Studio on this one; it's the direct result of spending too much time cutting the grass at home. (And THEN I can blame the Southern Studio a little bit, because I went there the next day and it certainly didn't help matters.) How does one spend too much time cutting the grass? By having an electric mower and starting the job with a bat...
159: The Yardbirds’ Jim McCarty
July 19, 2022 07:03 - 1 hour - 56.6 MBScreen capture of McCarty during our Zoom-based interview. Jim McCarty is one of the founding members of The Yardbirds, and he's recently published his second book, She Walks in Beauty: My Quest for the Bigger Picture. It's a journey that starts with the death of his wife Lizzie and then jumps back to earlier in his life, as he examines the various things that connect us to parts of the world that are just beyond our reach. I was hooked immediately when I began reading this book, and no dou...
158: Give It Away
July 10, 2022 04:24 - 10 minutes - 8.64 MBWhen the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik first came out, I'd just left a job working in a record store and was doing some part-time work as a mobile DJ. I had a few regular gigs here and there on Long Island, which is where it's at when you do that sort of thing, because you get to know your crowd and who likes what, etc. Weddings and birthday parties, etc. were just Death on a Triscuit, because you have guests of all different ages, and the old people want to hear one thing, and...
157: Planet Earth’s Greatest Hits
June 23, 2022 06:33 - 53 minutes - 43.3 MBThis is a show that I made a long while back specifically for the Patreon crowd. Those are the folks who have been supporting the program and helping me to cover some of the hosting and other costs attached to doing the show (e.g. subscriptions, software, etc.). In fact, it was so long ago that the show's logo changed in the interim. I had to re-do the cover art to accommodate the change. (Changing the lettering is easy; the rest of it was more complicated than it should have been. But now I'...
Ikigai–a special message for listeners
June 23, 2022 06:31 - 6 minutes - 5.36 MBHi, folks: I know, the feed has been quiet for awhile. Listen and you'll hear a little bit of the story, and what happens next. (Don't worry, I'm not quitting the show.)
156: Good Lovin’
April 17, 2022 16:43 - 13 minutes - 11.5 MBFor the last few weeks I've been having some weird troubles with the websites for both this podcast and the other one (wordsandmovies.com, in case you didn't know), especially with the other one. Pages would load slowly on my end, or not at all, which made it very difficult for me to post anything. And in the case of this site, it rendered releasing new episodes nearly (but not completely) impossible. So, after many hours on the phone with my webhost provider—most of them on hold—I finally g...
155: Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)
April 02, 2022 07:21 - 13 minutes - 11.8 MBIf you want to get technical about it, Looking Glass was NOT a one-hit wonder. "Brandy" was, to be sure, their biggest hit and the song that most people identify with the band. But "Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne," the opening track from their second album, spent only one week less on the Billboard Hot 100 chart than "Brandy" did. Okay, it peaked at #33 while "Brandy" spent most of its chart life at or near the top, but still. "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" was actually a departure from their usual...
154: Everybody Have Fun Tonight
March 07, 2022 05:33 - 11 minutes - 9.72 MBWang Chung was a band that wasn't getting a lot of traction when they had a more traditionally Chinese name. I remember that early self-titled album Huang Chung and I have to admit I was a little put off by it, because it frankly wasn't especially cool-looking, so I didn't give it much of a chance. By the time their fourth album, Mosaic, came out, they'd switched labels a couple of times and had enlisted the help of people like David Geffen and Peter Wolf to get them on track. In fact, Wolf...
153: I Can Help
February 20, 2022 03:01 - 13 minutes - 11.7 MBOK, I know it's not midweek, as I'd promised. But I am back after an unscheduled hiatus, and with any luck I'll be posting more regularly. Patrons, I'll be updating you regularly in the Newsletter (which I swear won't be so much about me, but you're on the journey too and I do appreciate your support). "I Can Help" is one of those songs that managed to come together very quickly for Billy Swan, and it turned into his biggest hit as a songwriter, and his only hit as a performer. One of the t...
152: Sundown (with guest Mike Messner)
January 03, 2022 03:44 - 32 minutes - 26.4 MBThis episode is a special one, boys and berries. Mike Messner, from the podcast Carefree Highway Revisited, joined me a few weeks ago to talk about the Gordon Lightfoot hit "Sundown." "Sundown" was Lightfoot's only song to reach Number One on the Billboard Hot 100. During our conversation we each took our own approach to the song. So what you're getting is a pretty well-rounded view of it. In addition, we make a couple of fun diversions to another Lightfoot song and my own personal heartac...
151: More Obscure Christmas
December 25, 2021 04:27 - 30 minutes - 25 MBOh, I do enjoy breaking format once in awhile to do special episodes like this one. For this year's Christmas episode, I return to the songs that you don't seem to hear on the radio when the stations are playing All Christmas All The Time. You'd think that with the huge catalog of recordings to choose from (even if the list of songs is relatively limited), radio stations could go on for literally days without ever repeating a recording. But no, we're going to get Mariah Carey and Trans Sibe...
150: Rock Lobster
December 21, 2021 05:41 - 13 minutes - 11.6 MBWhen the B-52s first hit the music scene, even their own reaction to the sound of their first album was "this is SO bleak!" because it was relatively unproduced. There was no reverb, no echo, no studio tricks filling out the gaps in the recording. And then they decided they liked it that way. Their first single, "Rock Lobster," was originally much faster. Then it was slowed down a little and made longer. Then it was cut down for the 45. Then it was cut down again for the radio. It didn't ma...
149: Musical Hookers
November 15, 2021 04:07 - 14 minutes - 11.6 MBThis whole episode came about because of a request by someone who wanted to hear the story behind a song. Unfortunately there wasn't a lot to it, but it got me thinking about other songs with similar subject matter. And now that I'm typing this, I realize that all the songs I discuss came from roughly the same period of time. What the hell was going on in the late 70s, anyway? Ah, well. With this episode I feel as though I've bookended a series that I started all the way back in Episode 80....
148: Another Chat With John Hall
October 18, 2021 04:34 - 38 minutes - 31.1 MBJohn Hall, you may remember from a couple of episodes ago, is the founder of the band Orleans. He recently released a solo album, his seventh (if you count the John Hall Band material). After spending some time in local and national politics, he returned to Orleans and they're still making music. In fact, at the time of the previous interview they were putting the finishing touches on Orleans' first Christmas album. That album is now finished and is available for your purchasing and listeni...
147: 99 Luftballons
October 12, 2021 04:09 - 3 BytesI gotta tell you, I've been trying like a maniac to record this episode for several days. I typically take a break in August when I go to the Podcast Movement confab (every other year, it seems), and I come back with a bunch of actionable ideas and a few new contacts, and I kind of have to let it percolate in my head before I'm ready to come back. In the meantime, I was working on a David Bowie episode, and I frankly got writer's block. I was going in a hundred directions at once, and the...
146: A Chat With John Hall
July 14, 2021 04:36 - 1 hour - 52.7 MBJohn Hall has been around the block a few times, and he's not finished traveling. In fact, when he and I chatted via Skype a short time ago, he was in the middle of a move from New York to Tennessee, and making that move in between gigs for both his solo shows and with the band that cemented his position in the Rock and Roll firmament, Orleans. In this episode we talk about the early days of his career, including how a couple of Orleans' first few hits came to be. We also get into his tim...
145: I Honestly Love You
July 09, 2021 07:48 - 13 minutes - 11.2 MBOriginal cover photo by awatif abdulaziz on Scopio Olivia Newton-John was already a pretty big star by the time 1974 rolled around, but she still hadn't scored a Number One hit. Then along came Peter Allen, who was coincidentally also from Australia. Allen was putting together an album of his own, and he enlisted Jeff Barry to help him with the songwriting. Together they put together "I Honestly Love You" and cut a demo. The intent of the demo was to have something to work from when the...
144: Everlasting Love
June 22, 2021 07:23 - 19 minutes - 15.7 MBThe interesting thing about this song is that it was written for a specific singer. That said, it's been a pretty big hit for many different artists over the years. "Everlasting Love" was written in 1967 specifically to match Robert Knight's voice, but it's proven to be quite the malleable tune. It's been rendered in R&B, in disco, in rock, in techno and god knows what else. So the story behind the song isn't incredibly interesting. Interesting, but not incredibly so. But the journey it's...
143: Me and Bobby McGee
May 11, 2021 05:26 - 14 minutes - 11.7 MBSince I was a young adult, I've liked listening to Janis Joplin. That bluesy rasp she always had going on really underlined her overall sound. And like so many others my age, I devoured her biography Buried Alive. One of the things that struck me then was the way so many of the people from her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, thought she'd ruined her voice because she'd sounded sweeter and purer as a teenager. Of course, they also bullied the hell out of her because she had an artistic mindset...
142: Anthony Robustelli
May 03, 2021 01:13 - 1 hour - 48.4 MBThis week I've got something extra-special for you. It's an interview with Anthony Robustelli, whom I got to speak with recently via Skype. Anthony is a musician who has toured with lots of big-name performers, he's written books about Steely Dan and The Beatles (with more to come currently on the back burner), he's got a Beatles-based podcast that takes a whole new look at them, and his latest project is a 3D animated rock opera that takes place in the ashes of the 2016 election. Whether y...
141: Fire and Rain
April 26, 2021 04:59 - 15 minutes - 12.9 MBJames Taylor was a talented guy, but early in his career he was having a tough time getting a break. Even when the Beatles signed him to their label, it was at a time that the label was coming unraveled and promotion was scarce. Plus, Taylor had his own issues to deal with. It took some time but he managed to get his act together, get himself cleaned up and get some talented people to work with him on his second album, which fortunately wasn't on Apple Records. With some support from Warner...
Where I’ve Been
April 26, 2021 04:57 - 1 minute - 1.24 MBWhere have I been? Let's start with: I'm okay, my family is okay, everybody's okay. My wife, as you may know, was considered especially vulnerable to the virus and spent a lot of time in the Southern Studio, but she's back home and everyone in the household is fully vaccinated, thank goodness. But that doesn't have a lot to do with where I've been. The fact is, I'm a victim of my own success. This show is considered "big, for a small podcast" which typically doesn't mean that much, but ...
140: Cars
March 22, 2021 04:26 - 11 minutes - 9.33 MBWhen I was in high school, there was a guy I knew named Phil. Phil and I shared an art class, a class I had to be talked into attending because I'd had a bad experience with an art class in the eighth grade. But I was told that the teacher was really good and kind of a cool guy, and sure enough he was. Mr. L, our art teacher, let us bring in our own music to listen to while we worked. So one fine day in the spring of 1980, Phil brings in a bunch of 45 records, and one of them was this song....
139: And When I Die
March 02, 2021 06:48 - 17 minutes - 14.1 MBLaura Nigro was a sixteen-year-old musical prodigy who was trying on several last names, as creative types sometimes do. She happened to be "Nyro" when she finally started to catch on in the music industry, so Laura Nyro she became. Nyro was never a huge star in her own right. But she left behind a musical legacy in a bunch of songs that became big hits for other artists. That's a roster that would include Three Dog Night, the Fifth Dimension, Barbra Streisand and Blood, Sweat and Tears. ...
138: Wish You Were Here
February 22, 2021 05:42 - 15 minutes - 13 MBIn a relatively short period of time, Pink Floyd went from a band with a fairly small but loyal fan base to an international phenomenon. And it was taking its toll on the members of the group. Even as they were putting together this, probably their most cohesive album, they were largely working in isolation. Only occasionally were all four members in the studio at the same time as they worked on it. This sense of alienation from each other and their newfound audience, plus the cynicism of t...
137: Same Old Lang Syne
January 13, 2021 06:55 - 15 minutes - 12.5 MBIt's kind of melancholy for a song that many consider to be a Christmas song, isn't it? What you have in this tune is the true story of two people who re-encounter each other after several years of separation. And as they spend some time re-connecting, they both recognize that despite opening up to each other, it doesn't mean that anything else is going to happen for them. The moment has passed them by, and they're mostly just left with the restlessness and maybe even some self-pity that th...
136: Ain’t No Sunshine
December 31, 2020 04:01 - 18 minutes - 14.6 MBBill Withers was an aspiring musician, but he kept his feet on the ground for a long time. Even after his first album started to climb the charts, he kept working his job assembling bathrooms in an airplane factory because he thought the music industry was fickle. He wasn't wrong, incidentally. But in his case he may have been pessimistic. It wasn't until "Ain't No Sunshine" went Gold that he finally left the factory job and went on tour to support the album. Given the star power that suppo...
135: Lesser Known Christmas Pop
December 25, 2020 07:46 - 30 minutes - 24.2 MBMerry Christmas! I actually had a different show in mind but I got to listening to some old radio airchecks (not my own) and I was inspired to do something different from the usual show. The first thing you'll notice is that it's a half-hour long. That's because I'm playing songs in their entirety and not really talking very much. (If any episode is going to net me a C&D letter, this'll be the one.) In this year's Christmas episode, I'm playing eight songs that don't get airplay anymore ...
134a: Maggie May
December 15, 2020 14:13 - 16 minutes - 13.2 MBThis is a re-upload of Episode 134 for the folks who got the bad file on the original send. If you've already heard this one, there's nothing new here and feel free to skip or delete it; I won't feel badly.
134: Maggie May
December 14, 2020 08:04 - 16 minutes - 13.2 MBNOTE: I got word that there was a problem with the uploaded file. It should be fine now. Apologies for those of you who had hassles. (Original photo by Meg Wagener for Unsplash) Let me start by thanking the show's newest Patron, Scott Fraser, for joining the family! Next: my apologies: I counted on taking a week's break but not two. I got remarkably sick a couple of times in the past week, culminating with a trip that involved having testing swabs stuck up my nose to varying depths, depe...
133: All I Wanna Do
November 23, 2020 06:31 - 15 minutes - 12.3 MBWhen Sheryl Crow finished her debut album, she decided that it didn't sound the way she wanted it to. So she actually convinced A&M Records to scrap it and let her start over. The result was a collaboration between her and several other Los Angeles-area musicians who met weekly to help each other with their songwriting. That quickly turned into a project dedicated to putting together Crow's second debut album. That group became the Tuesday Night Music Club, because that's the night they'd m...
132: Knock Three Times
November 09, 2020 03:52 - 16 minutes - 13.4 MBSo I'm in the Southern Studio again this weekend, which means I don't have a good handle on the way the show sounds until long after I've posted it. Also, I tried something very different with my workflow this week so I'm curious to know what you think of the way the shows sounds at your end. I won't be upset if you think it stinks, promise. Next week I'll be back in Baltimore, sounding more typical. To tell the story of "Knock Three Times" we had to dive a little bit into the early career...
131: Candle in the Wind
November 02, 2020 08:37 - 19 minutes - 15.5 MBElton John and Bernie Taupin were in a remarkably productive period in the early 1970s. Over a span of just two weeks they'd not only written enough material for an album, they'd written enough for two. And they were thematically similar enough that all the songs could be combined into a single two-LP package. That became the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which yielded three hit singles. It would have generated at least one more, but in the meantime John had cranked out yet another ...
130: The Twist
October 19, 2020 05:02 - 17 minutes - 14.1 MBFirst off, I have to note that I do have fun doing the artwork for these episodes. Where were we? Oh yeah. Somewhere in the late 50s, early 60s. And Hank Ballard has a new song that's picking up traction in Baltimore thanks to the Buddy Deane Show, when suddenly it gets yoinked out from under him by a newcomer from Philadelphia. That newcomer is named Chubby Checker, and the song is (surprise!) "The Twist," which rockets to the top of the charts just a few weeks after Dick Clark features ...
129: Seasons in the Sun
October 12, 2020 06:32 - 16 minutes - 13.4 MBIt's whiny. It's treacly. It's mushy. It's kind of a bad song. I'm not going to talk you out of any of those things. This isn't one of those shows where I try to convince you—and perhaps myself—that an objectively bad song is somehow good. (And if you don't know what songs those are, that means I'm doing a pretty good job.) But the fact is, "Seasons in the Sun" absolutely dominated nearly the first half of 1974, and like Kurt Cobain, it was one of the first records I bought with my own mone...
128: In Your Eyes
September 28, 2020 06:28 - 19 minutes - 15.7 MBBy 1985 Peter Gabriel had released four solo albums, all of them titled Peter Gabriel. Nowadays most people subtitle them based on the cover artwork (e.g. Peter Gabriel (Scratch), Peter Gabriel (Melt), etc.), and while I suppose that amused Gabriel, it did not amuse the folks at his label. They pushed back hard to get him to take marketing his work more seriously, so he came up with a title that wasn't really much of a title: So. But Gabriel had, perhaps because of his work on Birdy, had c...
127: Foreign Influence
September 21, 2020 06:09 - 12 minutes - 10.2 MBI don't know why it fascinated me so much recently to poke around with songs that had foreign lyrics in them. But, here we are. This week's show (and I promise I'm done with the premise for awhile) looks at four songs between 1969 and 1984 which have non-English phrases in them. Some of them have been hilariously misunderstood for a long time. One of them is pretty obvious but I decided to throw it in anyway. And one may come as a surprise to you, especially if you don't speak Spanish. As p...