Famous Songs You’ve Never Heard: A list of unheralded ten

Over the course of the last five years, I’ve composed a series of posts entitled Famous Songs You’ve Never Heard, which were meant to highlight music that hadn’t been heard by nearly enough ears in my world.

Over the last five years, I’ve managed to compose five entries.

I haven’t quite hit the caliber of diversity I want from this project, extended as though it might be, and I might never actually hit it. But what I can do is give you a hint of what I want it to be, long term, when I decide to actually write long-form again.

So here’s another project interlude meant to shake me out of a proverbial creative stupor. Here’s ten songs, and snippets about what each of those ten songs mean to me, over the course of an adulthood of listening to music. I’m giving myself exactly as much time to write about the songs as it takes me to listen to them. The thoughts will get out, and then the piece will be done.

The perpetual warning: my background is Christian music, in all the extensive variety of definitions that “Christian music” might mean. The songs that land here aren’t exclusively Christian – there’s a strong indie influence as well, songs that a grown-up college radio DJ might find and cherish – but if you seek out common threads, you’ll find them, and you’ll find them in Jesus-music, from the word go.

As is often the case, Radio U has been Where Music Is Going for much of my adulthood, and they get credit for a lot here as well, starting with the first track.

I spent much of my early CCM days as a White Heart burnout, and there are plenty of stories to tell about how many events of my college days centered around one White Heart concert in Fort Wayne or another White Heart concert at Taylor U. I never got to see White Heart play with Gordon Kennedy or Tommy Sims, though; the definitive White Heart lineup, the one at the center of Emergency Broadcast and Freedom, escaped me.

So listening to a very prog-rock influenced track on Radio U one fine summer afternoon was a breath of fresh air, and when I found out the band behind it was longtime session and studio hand Jimmie Lee Solas and old White Heart guitarist Gordon Kennedy, I was all-in.

Dogs Of Peace have recorded two albums, and those albums are twenty years apart. That’s my kind of recording schedule.

 

I have spoken of my deep affection for LAUNCHcast and the music I discovered through that service before. When I talk about those fine days of discovering music, the time I heard Elizabeth Elmore’s main band for the first time is the moment of discovery I most look back on with fondness. The snare and the guitar just sucked me right into this song, and the moment Elizabeth Elmore opened her mouth, I was a fan forever – not merely of Sarge, but everything that came after as well. The Reputation is an even more underrated group.

I would probably still be a fan even if I was the man she was singing about. Her songwriting pen was always wicked and smart.

 

This song. If any song was worth a whole article on its own, it’s this one. I honestly don’t know if I could recall all the details, though.

I heard this song for the first time at the old venerable Decatur, Georgia music venue Eddie’s Attic. Kevin was opening for Vigilantes of Love, but he sang like he wanted the bill all to himself. The songs tore me apart, completely.

For this song he brought a local legend up – for the life of me, I can’t remember his name – but someone who it would be found later was dealing with cancer and didn’t have long. “No Place” is a prayer, a song that’s earnestly searching for peace and confident that peace had been found. The harmonies on that song will always be a place I long to return to.

And that pleading in the middle. The apostle wrote about groans that words cannot express once.

 

Another LAUNCHcast discovery, from the genre that would come to be known as Americana, this time with the haunting electric guitar. I have a thing for haunting electric guitar, even more so when the lyrics haunt as much as the guitar.

Sometimes I run out of things to say just because I’m so taken by a twenty-year-old song all over again.

 

This was a discovery I made at that finest of Christian music festivals, Cornerstone, back in 2001 or so. I walked past the stage where four fine merchants of this new sound called emo were playing – I think I was with Eaton – and my attention was seized immediately.

I immediately sought out everything that Brandston had ever done, and when a new Brandtson album came out the following year, and it sounded a thousand times better than anything that I had heard on that stage, it was all over. Deep Elm records, and I am deeply fond of them.

“I’m writing my anthem to this sixty-cycle hum” is, if I interpret it correctly, the finest lyric about alternating current that has ever been written.

 

Some songs are songs that I just listen to when I have teenaged angst entirely too late in life, and there isn’t really much more to say about it. I cherish this opening track from Faulter’s only album so much.

There’s so much to be said about the driving guitar and drums in the first verse breaking down to the syncopation and groove in the chorus.

 

Far and away the most obscure find on this list – and I’m super grateful for an Iowa music festival clip from 2007. I have both albums this track appears on, if you want to hear a clandestine studio version from an album that’s long since out of print.

One of the best things about the old Cornerstone Festival were the side stages where literally anyone could set up and play and sell their wares. Of all the bands I’ve heard this way (and with all love to Luminate and the song that I cherished that they never released, “And So It Goes”), General Sherman (of all the band names for a Southern boy!) is the band that stuck with me for the long haul. Dana, on guitar, was the one who wound up having the larger measure of success with a later band, Parlours, But it’s Becca’s voice, singing lead here, that I always wanted to hear more of.

Somewhere in a dark corner of the internet there’s stuff I wrote about hearing General Sherman for the first time in 2006 or so. I don’t know if I’ll find that dark corner of the internet again.

 

The least obscure on this list follows the most. Still, I have had exactly one conversation about the Jimmy Eat World EP that fell in between Futures and Chase This Light in my life, and it was about that person’s unawareness that this EP even existed. Maybe this is stretching “you’ve never heard”.

But this is an essential inclusion for a single reason: an extended guitar solo, in the mid-2000’s. Such unicorns were thought to be dead with grunge, I gathered. I cherish this. I cherish this so much. I cherish it so much more because the solo absolutely SOARS, and without the kind of virtuosity you expect of the classic rock guitar hero; the textures and the crescendo are simply everything. I can’t recommend this song highly enough, even if you’ve heard it.

 

The track I most looked forward to hearing from the album that was being worked on when I wrote the first entry in this series. I cried the first time I heard the recorded version, and I will never be ashamed of that.

 

I’ll finish this top ten with the guy responsible for my rediscovery of hip-hop. There were many directions I could have gone here, but this project from last year that detailed a relationship, warts and all – not merely from a Christian perspective, but from a distinctly African-American Christian perspective – enraptures me in so many ways.

Sho Baraka is a creative force, and his songwriting partner (but not his life partner!) Vanessa Hill compliments his vision perfectly and contributes vocal perfection. The product is something with a depth of maturity I haven’t heard from the art form before, a tale of genuine appreciation of husband and wife for one another.

 

I deliberately left others off this list that I could have included, and that should have more said about them, because I have incomplete thoughts gathered here and there, and I want to turn those thoughts into full stories and reflections one of these days. For now, though, I hope you hear something new that draws you in, and gives you a new musical vein to explore.

Famous Songs You’ve Never Heard #5 – Mr. Mister

ETA, 18 April 2020: It just came to my attention that when you search for “new Mr. Mister” on Google, one of the first things you hit is this post! Welcome, fellow Mr. Mister fans, and the new songs you’re looking for are on the re-released version of this album – Richard Page gives you the links for the songs on his website. Stick around and let me tell you about how deeply I’m been affected by one of the other songs from PULL…

This is a (very long-term) series of posts on songs that are exceptionally obscure, and that even most serious music fans will never have heard and that deserve more exposure.

Of all the bands that could ever appear on such a list, Mr. Mister is a terribly unlikely name. Mr. Mister had one of the iconic albums of the 80’s, Welcome To The Real World, which spawned two #1 singles: the slow-dance standard “Broken Wings” and the positive-pop anthem “Kyrie”. And while Go On… didn’t sell anywhere near as many copies, it had an MTV-ready single (“Something Real”, which snuck onto the Billboard Top 30) and a standout movie’s title track (“Stand and Deliver”, also notable for appearing in a Hilliard Middle/Senior High School yearbook as a certain 1989 senior’s favorite song).

So “No Words To Say”, which turned out to be the first and only Mr. Mister song with lyrics by Richard Page alone, working without his longtime collaborator John Lang, is a Famous Song You’ve Never Heard because of the story of Mr. Mister’s follow-up to Go On….

If you were even aware that Go On… existed at all, you might be surprised by the existence of another Mr. Mister album. And you should be, unless you’ve paid the closest of attention. Because it was recorded. And then RCA never released it.

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Andre Salles, of the Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. blog, wrote what’s in my mind the definitive ode to Mr. Mister’s late career seven years ago. His emotions about Go On… very neatly mirror my own; I’ve never lost my affection for the crisp opening tones of “Stand And Deliver”, for the yearning behind “Healing Waters” and “The Border”, for the unspoken stories in the textures of “Dust,” and for the determination in every word of “Something Real.”

But that story is comparatively known.

 The next part of the story – of Steve Farris’ departure, of the work the remaining three members did to work out a serious artistic step beyond Go On…, of the changes in the recording industry under the band’s feet, and of RCA’s ultimate rejection of the album breaking up the band, remained the stuff of fan rumor for the longest time. Salles even writes his own story of his exploration of that next step not by hearing an official release of Pull, the lost Mr. Mister album, but by tracking down and downloading bootleg copies of the songs that had leaked from RCA and been dubbed and redubbed.

The remastered and offical album was finally released in November 2010 on frontman Richard Page’s Little Dume Recordings, to the delight of die-hard fans and very few others. And ultimately, most observers – up to and including the members of the band themselves – understood why RCA didn’t hear a commercially viable album. The songs were much darker, from time to time they veered into pop/jazz fusion, and the lyrics were very challenging. Even the song the band called “son of Broken Wings”, “Waiting In My Dreams”, didn’t speak of hope but of hopelessness and loneliness, with the only outlet being the dreamlife – “when I close my eyes, you’re all I see…the only time you’re next to me.” The repeated “Kyrie Eleison” from Welcome To The Real World was a hopeful Greek prayer that any youth group leader could use; the lyrics of Pull’s “Lifetime” recalled Gabriel García Márquez’ Love In The Time Of Cholera, which (while hopeful over the long haul) didn’t get talked about near as much in church when I was growing up.

But the challenge is worth the reward, and like so much in the music industry in the 90’s, a label’s failure to hear the prospect of immediate sales robbed the musicians of a chance to share a fully realized piece of art with the world. There wasn’t a vision for how a unique album with a famous name behind it could find its audience. And how a uniquely challenging message could resonate.

And that message was needed, and still is needed.

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Here is Richard Page, describing what he was attempting to convey with “No Words To Say”:

I’d collaborated with John Lang for years and years on lyrics, but that song was one of the first I’d took on myself to write. It was kind of a seminal moment for me. Plus, it was a recollection of my growing up in the deep South in the ’50s with the civil rights movement and all the chaos, from a kid’s point of view…

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was there in Montgomery, Alabama, and they were marching and it was in the news all the time. I played pop warner football with George Wallace, Jr. My best friend across the street – his father was rumored to be a high official in the KKK. White and black drinking fountains and restrooms and things like that.

And yet, we had a maid – a black woman – who was so beautiful and kind. My mother worked, and this woman was with me and my siblings all the time, she was part of the family. From a kid’s point of view, again, why would anybody hate anybody because of their color? But more importantly, why didn’t people who knew better speak out? That’s what I achieved as an adult, looking back – where were the adults going, “This is wrong, we have to change this”? There weren’t very many – of course there were a few – but that’s where the song came from.

And that’s not to say I’m above any of the accusations I’m throwing either. We all carry with us a lot of prejudices and they’re unconscious, many of them. And again, not rocking the boat is more important than getting the truth for a lot of us.

What’s striking about “No Words To Say”, beyond the stark and evocative lyrics, is Page’s phrasing of them. For somebody who’s been accused of having a vanilla voice and a bland pop sensibility, Page weaves these words through the song in a fashion that’s almost more reminiscent of spoken-word than singing:

There were those who know the tables would turn
Running out into the burning streets
And hoping to hear the words
Of a prophet or a sage who might come along
And straighten out the mess they had made
The injustice and cruelty by their own hands
Of the ones of another shade

Page hears a the sound of protest vividly, the language of the unheard – “growing sweeter and more murderous all at once” – and longs for one of the adults in his very white life to lead with integrity, instead of pretending like everything is OK and taking advantage of the benefits of their privilege. Too many lived their lives quietly, silently.

It doesn’t strike the ear like a first tentative effort at solo lyricism. It strikes the ear as a masterwork.

When I finally heard it for the first time in 2010, Pull offered closure – the conclusion of the progression that the path from Welcome To The Real World to Go On… marked. But the more I’ve listened to it, the more Pull has become its own entity, and an album I go to in its own right, its own work of art.

And the song “No Words To Say” has challenged me more and more with each passing year. It becomes clearer and clearer with each passing day that whatever progress we’d allowed ourselves to believe had been made in hearing every voice and giving value to every life was an illusion, that the positive steps that had been taken can just as easily be walked back. The ways of change continue to be peculiar. People are still trying to hide their eyes.

Richard Page, it turns out, spoke the prophetic words he wrote about. They are words we still need to hear, perhaps now more than ever. And the mess we have made will require a lifetime’s of work to straighten out.

Famous Songs You’ve Never Heard #4 – Come Wind

Full marks for this iteration go to the networks of Radio U, that little radio station that saved my life in grad school and that became a lot more than that, which I still check every now and again just so that I can know Where Music Is Going.

See, musical waypoints were always very easy to find when I was young. I spent almost the entirety of the ages between childhood and 21 hearing new things; going from my parents’ taste in music (on albums, on 8-track, and on the old, old reel-to-reel) to discovering country radio to discovering pop radio to discovering all the possible different formats in between to wondering why I never heard any of the songs that Donnie Simpson played on Video Soul on the radio to discovering this little thing called “college rock” or “alternative” to going to college and being immersed in that to a pair of albums that changed how I thought not just about music, but about life.

Musical waypoints became much more difficult to find after I left college. In fact, for the first few years after I landed in Columbus and I wasn’t around many people with similar musical tastes initially, I found a little bit of static in my listening. Old friends kept up with electronically helped (hooray, rec.music.christian!) and new friends found…electronically helped (hooray, rec.music.christian!). There’s something of a gap in my library between 1993 and 1996, when on a fateful February morning, Radio U came on the air.

Radio U was exactly the radio this not-entirely-mature-but-entirely-too-earnest doctoral student needed in 1996. I loved the rock, and I did listen to CD 101 and 99.7 The Blitz as I moved, but I was still a very young Jesus-seekin’ Christian and I wasn’t getting to Cornerstone Festival after ’93 and I wanted more of that kind of music in my life. Radio U delivered it, and then some.

I’m going to spare you all the waypoints that intervened, except to say that there were more than a few earnest Christian kids in Columbus, Ohio in 1996 who, twenty years on, probably still get a bit emotional when they hear the guitars that open Stavesacre’s “At The Moment”. But I’m always grateful to that station that became this Christian-broadcasting multimedia thing that gave me confidence that Christians weren’t merely interested in making shiny happy music for the masses, but actual art.

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Twenty years later, without even thinking that the radio station was twenty years old, while I was figuring out how to make a Roku box work on a TV, I installed a Radio U Roku app.

And I figured I could watch and see what was Most Wanted.

I have no clue what the first song I listened to was. It was kinda pounding and kinda Klingon and I just can’t get behind that sound no matter how much I give it a chance.

Now, the second song…well.

See, there’s a formulaic Christian song structure that I get used to, even in rock styles. That track resists every template. It resists it sonically, and it resists it lyrically. Every time I think I know what I’m about to hear, the song turns left and does something just a TINY bit different.

I enjoy that.

That sticks around for a couple of days and then I can’t get the track out of my mind and in 2016 when you can’t get a track out of your mind you take to the YouTubes.

And…WELL.

Now, there IS a traditional music video for this song, and you should listen to it and watch it and stuff. But that lyric video is unlike anything I have ever seen. And it implants words into my head.

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I wrote a short thing about Jimmy Eat World’s “I Will Steal You Back” and the fight of the last two-plus years – losing an institution, regaining status (for whatever that status means), and vocalizing what is lost. That song spoke to motivation, and to ambition – perhaps a dumb motivation, perhaps a foolhardy ambition, but the hope that I could contribute to change, and that change will be for the better.

So, of course, the very first song on this album has the refrain “Things don’t seem to change; they move in place, they stay the same.” And “People never change; they move in place, they stay the same.” You make the commitment, you take action, and then…nothing.

And then, as the first song dissolves into the second, the finger goes from pointing to other people to pointing at the self.

I was always out in front of it
Waging war against the storms when I felt overwhelmed and withheld
You and I were like a pair of thieves
Stealing from rich and giving to whoever we saw fit
Now you’re over it

I’ve been wrong a thousand different times
But I don’t know, I don’t know this time
You were there through every single lie and crime
What do you think of your son now?

The title of the song is “Birds Will Never Fly”, and the resignation behind the words is VERY heavy. And the doubt.

These are the left turns I hear in the words. Who is he singing to? God? His father on earth? The next lyric is “Wait a minute, I was here for you/Now you’re sick, you’re sick/I’m sick of it too” which frustrates me as much as ANY lyric I’ve heard in forever. I suppose it works both ways; disgust in the human relationship, projecting exasperation in the heavenly relationship. I really don’t know – except the frustration mirrors my own frustration at my own ineptitude.

Frustration isn’t good. It’s a result of not living in the world that isn’t what it can be. But frustration is good in that we have that picture of a better world, and we’re not content, and we’re motivated towards greater things.

The songs that open Move In Place put voice to frustration as beautifully as I have EVER heard from popular music.

And I feel that frustration more and more pointedly by the day. I know I have purpose here (and I have moments where I get, ahem, “clarity” regarding that purpose). But I also know intellectually how hard it is to make the world better, how to encourage people to cooperate. And even with knowing that intellectually, the emotions that surround that reality are heavy.

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In the time between when I started writing this and now, I started a new job, learned a new city, moved into a new house (a full month and change after starting the job), and flailed in a new laboratory with experiments that worked sometimes (and they were experiments of my own design so it’s mostly my fault; in fact I’m finishing this while I’m trying to figure out how to salvage one of ’em). It’s felt like nothing’s gone right this fall, and often.

I have needed the first half of Move In Place. A lot. And I have a series of songs that are now waypoints to me, in same way I’ve gotten waypoints for other times in my life.

It’s reassuring, y’know? I’m nearly 45 years old. I’m in all likelihood over halfway through my life. And I can still find rock songs that speak to my season and that revitalize me.

And I need that song that laments how people never change to transition itself – into a song that speaks to a thing that remains the same.

Thanks to the men of Come Wind for the soundtrack to a new era in my life.

Famous songs you’ve never heard #3 – John Austin

This is probably going to be a series I work on literally for the rest of my life, at this point. I’m averaging six months per post.

But, because it’s July 4th, a story came to mind.

My first Cornerstone Festival (RIP) was 22 years ago this year. It may not be what you think of when you think “bachelor party”, getting together with old friends and driving to a Christian rock festival, but it was mine, and I enjoyed the music more than a small bit. And I enjoyed the company more. Some of my favorite people from my just-completed undergrad (and a couple of dear friends from Franklin College) came along with me for the trip, we camped on the grounds, we saw more people with piercings and punk hair and tattoos for Jesus than we had ever seen in our lives; it was a moment in time I’ll always be grateful for.

The debate of the week had to do with John Austin’s debut record, recorded for Myrrh/Glasshouse Records – one of the new major Christian imprints of the moment that was going to be all about the artistic singer-songwriter, but artistic with INTEGRITY because after all it’s a Christian label. Austin had recorded a couple of demo tracks that my friend Dave got when he went to Cornerstone in ’91, “The Embarrassing Young” and “Island Girl” – and he couldn’t stop raving about those tracks, and he was excited for the full album. But when he got it, he was deeply disappointed because of the overproduction that went into several of the tracks, most notably “Island Girl”, which he loved.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Glasshouse was still too beholden to the Christian music apparatus of the era, which lacked any sort of creative edge whatsoever. There were creative artists on Glasshouse, but precious little of what was recorded registered – and what did register with the ears of people like me got too little love from everybody else. Glasshouse Records didn’t last nearly long enough, nor did John Austin’s major label deal.

But a bunch of kids who were bound for grad school and advanced degrees (and one who was bound to find his car battery had gone dead over the weekend) still enjoyed a show on July 4, 1993, one of the last sets of the festival. And Austin brought the goods. I know I’m a nerd who likes cheesy stuff, but lines like “Could’ve been a legend if I’d died in my prime/Could’ve been a poet if I’d known how to make the words sound alike” and “I don’t know the language, but I’ve got the accent down” have a permanent place in my brain; Austin’s witty songwriting and the tight music made me a fan.

And while I’d listened to the demo tracks Dave had and REALLY enjoyed them, when I heard the fully-produced stuff, I never really found myself missing the stripped-down quality. I’ve kept the album – and those songs – front and center in my CD rack, and then on my mp3 player, and then in iTunes, for a couple of decades now. Austin never has gotten the attention he merits, and it’s a shame.

“It’s the Fourth of July”, John Austin said towards the end of that set in Bushnell, Illinois 22 years ago. “Here’s our national anthem.”

Forever not knowing the language; forever having the accent down. Thanks for the tunes, John.

(This album, in addition to later independent work and a 2005 compilation record, can be found and ordered on Austin’s bandcamp site. And, hey, Dave: the demo of “Island Girl” is on the compilation.)

Famous songs you’ve never heard of #2 – Hunters and Collectors

(I started writing this in June. Lawd, what a summer. This may yet turn into a series; in case you missed it, here is part 1.)

I would like to start this second installment by apologizing to the continent of Australia.  For many, many of you, the title of this post does not apply to you.

But it does apply to the overwhelming majority of people in the United States, and it certainly applied to me as I began my college radio career.

I honestly don’t know what I expected when I heard that Rose-Hulman had a college radio station.  I know that I had discovered “alternative music” (you know, R.E.M., the B-52’s, 10,000 Maniacs, Midnight Oil, and all those other important bands that MTV played…I was even really hip and had the Smithereens’ cassette tape) and there was a radio station at Baldwin-Wallace College, across the street from my grandparents’ house, that played some REALLY exotic sounds, like the Sugarcubes (from Iceland! how exotic! who had this lead singer named Björk! how exotic!) and Siouxsie and the Banshees (see? not Susie, but Siouxsie! see, I’m hip!). I was absolutely certain, I guess, that I would find even more exotic stuff, and the music I would listen to would be SO elite and would blow SO many minds and I would just be the coolest person on the planet.

I was kind of bummed when, on my arrival, that old WMHD program director tried to impress on me the importance of the blues and of this other old guy named Elvis Costello. Old folks. I wasn’t up for the old folks. I was up for the new and the cool.

But as I went through my DJ training, one thing that the station manager [1] impressed upon all of us new DJ’s, and the thing that was so much of the ethos of college radio in the 80’s and 90’s, was always listening and playing something new. People wouldn’t tune in to WMHD to listen to “Pinball Wizard” or “Love In An Elevator” (or even “Blister In The Sun” or “What I Am”) for the hundred thousandth time. They would listen expecting something they didn’t hear every day, and what you should do is look for the best of the stuff that other radio wouldn’t play.

It was in that season of my life that I flipped through the old College Music Journal and read a writeup on a new album by a band I’d never heard of with a name I thought was cool – Hunters and Collectors. And I had just noted the album Ghost Nation in the new music stacks.

Let’s give this a spin, shall we?

Here is track 1.

It wasn’t terribly exotic. There was a bit there that satisfied the nascent Midnight Oil fan in me, which made sense because Australia. But it was, at its core, a unique take on straight-ahead rock and roll.

I liked it. I liked it a lot.

It wasn’t something ABSOFREAKINLUTELY INCREDIBLE THAT EVERYBODY MUST BUY NOW, or anything like that, mind. This isn’t a story of a song that radically changed my life. It is a story of a song that gently, but consistently, nudged how I approached music.

I quit seeking the newest, freshest, most exotic sounds. I wouldn’t run away from them if they turned up, mind. But what I wanted was the best songs. Even in 1989, there were so many different artists doing things that didn’t get major radio play or any serious notoriety. We were there, in part, to be the champions for the best of those.

Of course, I soon found out that Hunters and Collectors had a great deal of notoriety halfway around the world. I discovered their back catalog (and much of the best of it is on Soundcloud – if I wanted to talk to you about songs that will change your life, I would totally be talking to you about “Holy Grail” right now), and discovered just how big of a deal they were.

And that’s a whole NEW layer on how the young mind develops – that your experience of the world is not everybody’s experience of the world, and music that is completely new to you is famous somewhere else, and what is old, dry and boring to you is revelatory to someone else.

This is obvious stuff, but these are the lessons that 18-year-old minds need to learn.

Famous songs you’ve never heard #1 – Katrina Barclay

I’ve had an idea brewing for ages and ages now, and for reasons I’ll get into shortly, if I’ve ever going to unleash that idea on the public now.

Humans who have known me for any length of time know that I’m a music nerd.  I tend to know it if it’s been released recently.  I know it well if it was released ten years ago, even more if it was released twenty, and if it was released sometime between the late 70’s and the early 90’s it’s been seared onto my consciousness.  And it’s not just top-40 that I know, either.  I grew up on modern country, so much so that what I consider modern country most folks throw into the “classic” bin.  Because of both my presence in church culture in my childhood and my collegiate (re-)discovery of Christianity, I’m far more familiar than most with Contemporary Christian music, of all kinds. Because I spent most of my undergraduate years playing around with college radio, I knew what alternative music was before alternative became mainstream. I have over 10,000 songs on my iTunes playlist, from million-sellers to hundred-sellers.  Literally.

I feel like a lot of these tracks should be a lot better known than they are.  And what’s more, my brain-dead habit – linking to tracks of songs on YouTube, because music video has always been YouTube’s killer app (even if that video just becomes the album cover just sitting there static) – isn’t possible with a lot of these songs, because they’re buried enough underneath the weight of all the other good (and not-so-good, and overhyped) music out there that nobody thinks that somebody might want to hear that song.  Or simply because, for one reason or another, nobody has thought to migrate to that part of the country and listen to what that artist has to say.

Hence, Famous Songs You’ve Never Heard.  Because I am not literary or original, I’ve stolen the title. (One of the chapters of Lewis Grizzard’s collections of columns Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You was called “Famous People You’ve Never Heard Of.” It was put together in the same vein – human interest columns about people who should have been important, for one reason or another.)

I’m going to put some effort in making this a series and drawing some songs from both my youth and my recent history out, and making this as much of a variety of music as I possibly can.

But I have an academic history.  And so I’m going to draw from that first.

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I’m pretty sure it was Fall 2008 when Katrina Barclay wound up in my physics classroom at Shorter.  She was a transfer from Northeast Alabama Community College, a common pre-med chemistry major with an uncommon kindness and grace.  Over two years, she came through both physics and physical chemistry, and she was a really solid student, and an even better classmate – somebody who you always wanted in your lab group, who would always show good cheer and better work.  And at the same time, I always had a sense her passion was elsewhere.

I had heard that Katrina could strum a guitar pretty good, and did a pretty good job of leading worship when she was called upon (and she and I figured out very early on that we were equal parts music nerd and had a LOT of good notes to trade with one another).  It didn’t really sink in, however, until sometime during her senior year when she sat down in my office and decided I was a person worth opening up to.  She had an EP’s worth of songs together, she said.  She was going to continue to be serious about performing – she wasn’t going to slack on study, by any stretch, but she was very serious about performing and making something work in music.  There were certain things she knew. She had something to say, and she had the voice to say it.

And here is what I will tell you for certain:

If there is something to be said, Katrina has the voice to say it.

 

Three years or so on, here’s a transcript of Katrina and I chatting about making career moves (and me misspelling “no end” right off the bat):

• Chuck Pearson
  I wish I was talking to you about careers in chemistry this creatively, because you are dang smart and I wish I had you employable in the major. Please know that I am annoyed to know end about this.
  But if you have the pipes to make music work, you should take advantage.
  (And holy cow I have played the crap out of “Time Machine”. That song. That VOICE. Dear heart.)

• Katrina Barclay
  I literally just vocalized to mom what you typed about “Time Machine”. It seems you’re the only one who cares much about it.

  The song is literally the sound of my heart breaking.
  Austen only made me sing it twice and he was like, “I’m not making you do it again.”

• Chuck Pearson
  I kind of get it. It’s a bit more of my technical side, I suppose. I mean, you put all the emotion into the song into it, and I get that. But you also paced it BRILLIANTLY; the timing of every note you sing, and how long you hold them – you TIMED the song to best communicate your emotions. And then you TAGGED EVERY LAST NOTE at the emotional climax. Not oversung, not undersung. IMMACULATE.

  Recorded, I don’t think you’ve ever *sung* better than that one.
  And with that much emotion, if it was me, I’d be oversinging the crap out of that.

• Katrina Barclay
  All I can say to you is thank you and I needed to hear that about it.

• Chuck Pearson
  I thought I’d said stuff like that before. But yes. “Time Machine” connected, and connected immediately, and connected like whoa.

• Katrina Barclay
  I think the timing of your review is what made it so special. I almost threw in the “Time Machine” towel because it has been getting not even poor response but ZERO response. Maybe it has just been shocking people a bit. I mean, I was overwhelmed by it when I wrote it, in the studio, and listening to the finished product.

• Chuck Pearson
  Well, like I said, having hung out with a vocal performance/musical theatre kid, I’ve been much more in tune with the technical performance stuff than the pure pop song impact. I don’t know how Time Machine relates to everybody else. I can’t QUITE say I can’t get enough of hearing it, because it it an incredibly emotional song. But I can say I play it a lot.

 

Look, there are a ton of stories that can be told about music from all sorts of different spaces that hasn’t had enough attention paid to it, the songs that the artist felt most deeply that never got an ounce of attention while the throwaway afterthought becomes The Great American Pop Song. So here’s one example. And, in particular, an example that is as breathtakingly sung as anything I’ve ever heard by somebody I actually know in real life.

Give it a couple of listens. You will not be sorry.

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Now, if I was going to start this project anything remotely soon, I had to start it now, and I had to start it with Katrina.  Here’s why.

Katrina is overdue to record a full album – her first since “In Your Shoes” in 2010.  She has the songs ready, and she’s pursuing the funding to make the work happen.  (I have heard a couple of these songs. I am being entirely selfish here. I desperately, desperately want to hear them recorded professionally.)  There is an IndieGoGo fundraising page for this purpose. She’s not quite halfway to her (relatively modest, IMO) goal, and there’s a week left in the campaign.

I’ve tossed a few pennies into the project. I really wish you’d do the same.  I believe in what Katrina’s doing, and I think given a listen, you’ll believe in what she’s doing as well.

I think there’s a ton of music that’s worth unearthing out there.  Each of us have local independent artists in our universe who deserve far, far greater exposure, and deserve to get some of our disposable income as well.  May we all do better in giving artists the capacity to do art, and to get paid for it.

And in the meantime, Katrina, please keep singing. That VOICE, dear heart. That. Voice.