Author Archives: The Music in My Ears (by Jamie Kyei)

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About The Music in My Ears (by Jamie Kyei)

Just one man who's making his way through life one day at a time writing about the songs he has on his phone. And other things at some points.

#1273: R.E.M. – Star 69

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After making Automatic for the People and releasing it for the people to hear in 1992, the members of R.E.M. made a conscious decision to make their next album rock. They figured that people would be expecting an Automatic… 2, more of the acoustic, introspective, ‘Everybody Hurts’/‘Losing My Religion’ type deal that had made them massively popular at the beginning of the ’90s. So to subvert those expectations, they made Monster, released in 1994, a record heavily inspired by glam rock and a little inspired by the grunge movement that was the style of the time. A lot of tremolo guitar effects happening on this album. And Michael Stipe shaved his head right down to the dome. It was a big deal. And one song I’ve always dug from it is the fifth track, ‘Star 69’.

Like the rest of the R.E.M. albums, I heard Monster in its entirety when I went through the band’s discography in the early months of 2018. It actually may have been the first two weeks of that year. I’d heard ‘What’s the Frequency, Kenneth’ a couple months prior for the first time, so I guess I was a little excited when it came round to hear Monster. That song will get its due on here another day. And I think ‘Star 69’ was a number on there that I liked pretty much instantly. Michael Stipe’s vocals are almost indecipherable, drowned in the applied echo effects and energetic guitar work of Peter Buck. When you find them online, you’ll see they tell something of a story in which Stipe knows a person who’s burned down a warehouse because that person went on to call him. He refuses to be involved with the whole situation. You’ll be breaking out the air guitar and jumping around to the punk rock attitude of it all. At least, that’s where I’ve found myself I few times.

What the title ‘Star 69’ refers to is the last-call return feature of telephones in the US. Someone called you on the landline and you missed it? Well, then you’d grab the phone, dial ‘star 69’ and your phone provider would tell you the last number that called and what time it happened. So that’s what Stipe’s talking about when he says ‘I know you called’ in the chorus. We have that service over here in the UK too. You dial ‘1-4-7-1’ instead. Not as cool as a song title, though. Overall, it’s got quite the outdated message because everyone uses mobile phones now, and it’s very easy to see who specifically called and where they’re calling from, in addition to the number that called and what time. But that’s just how things were in the ’90s, man. The early 2000s too. Song makes for a nice little capsule. Always a good time hearing it.

#1272: Graham Coxon – Standing on My Own Again

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I know for sure that an official music video exists for this track. It’s just that it’s nowhere to be found on YouTube and seems to be wiped off the face of the internet. By seeing it what felt like every day for a period in 2006 on MTV2, I became very familiar with Graham Coxon’s ‘Standing on My Own Again’ very quickly. It was released as the first single from his then forthcoming album Love Travels at Illegal Speeds. As I write to you, I’m starting to wonder whether this was the first song by him that I had ever heard, or if it was ‘Freakin’ Out’. Maybe I answer that question in the post for that track. To keep things mysterious, I won’t go and find out. But I do know for sure that I didn’t know who Blur was, and so for a bit I just recognised Coxon as this solo artist who was just doing his thing. Doing it well too.

In Coxon’s words, the song builds a scene where the narrator’s standing on a grey and muddy beach looking out at a ship that’s sinking and likening its situation to a relationship where neither person involved are enjoying themselves anymore. You think of that and hear the lyrics, or read ’em, and it all makes perfect sense. It’s much better watching Coxon explain it all himself. Combine that with a charging performance led by striding guitars and a wailing vocal performance, it makes for some very cathartic listening. Coxon performs with what was his usual live band in the music video, but I didn’t find out until quite recently that in the studio he played all the instruments himself. I always knew him to be a great guitarist. He ain’t to shabby on the bass guitar and drums as well.

Yeah, listening to this song will always take me back to those days in 2006 when I was pretty much sitting in front of the TV all day watching music videos and seeing this song on a regular basis. I seem to remember this and ‘All These Things I Hate’ by Bullet for My Valentine were usually played within a video or two of each other. And looking at the Wiki pages for both songs, they were both released in February of that year. At least my memory’s still somewhat kicking. Love Travels at Illegal Speeds will be out for 20 years in 2026, so hopefully the videos for ‘Standing…’ and fellow single ‘You & I’ show their faces for the anniversary. Until then, here’s the making of the video for the former, just to show you I’m not going crazy about a magical video that may or may not be real.

#1271: Billy Talent – Standing in the Rain

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Back in the days of 2005, Billy Talent’s official website used to look like this. Two years after the release of their debut album, the design was still very much focused on that era. And the example I provide was the page that came up if you didn’t have Flash installed. Now that Flash is busy not existing anymore, not even Archive can go further than that. But I can tell you that when Flash was the thing to have, you were able to watch the band’s music videos, either through Quicktime or Windows Media, catch up on the latest news regarding the group, and listen to three of the songs from the debut album as a kind of preview through an integrated music player on the homepage. I want to say one was ‘Try Honesty’, another was ‘Line & Sinker’, and the third was ‘Standing in the Rain’. So I knew that one almost by heart before I had the album for myself.

‘Standing in the Rain’ is the eighth number on Billy Talent, a bleak one about the struggles of a prostitute. Not sure there’s much to pick apart in my opinion, because the lyrics are very much what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Ben Kowalewicz sings from the point of view of a woman of the night, or man, you don’t know, the gender’s never revealed in the words, detailing their misery. An annotation on Genius says the track was inspired by the Pig Farm murders carried out by Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton. I can’t find any other source by the band that corroborates this interpretation. It may very well be true. Maybe Kowalewicz and guitarist Ian D’Sa were just inspired to write about prostitution and thought it would be interesting to cover it from the prostitute’s point of view. I’d like to think it was just that. You can’t believe everything you see on those lyrics sites.

Just a solid, solid performance throughout by the band. D’Sa very much plays a strong rhythm guitar on this one rather than doing the simultaneous lead/rhythm guitar playing he carries out on the vast majority of the record. But the chord choices and progressions are still as strong. A lot of the attention, I think, may probably be directed to the harmonies and general singing carried out by D’Sa and Kowalewicz. They sing in unison for the pre-chorus, before the former goes to the higher harmony for the actual chorus. And then in the break, D’Sa takes the lead for a brief second before Kowalewicz joins in and the rest of the band crash in together for the song’s closing moments. On a personal note, I’ve always thought the mixing of the cymbals sounded a little strange during the opening. I know they were recorded separately from the actual drumkit during production, but I don’t know what it is. Anyone else can agree or disagree. But if you can at least get what I’m on about, I’ll be plenty happy.

#1270: Dizzee Rascal – Stand Up Tall

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I remember being alive in 2003 and seeing Dizzee Rascal on The Box with ‘I Luv U’. His first ever single, released from the seminal Boy in da Corner. I was eight years old. I didn’t understand it at all. Then ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’ came around, and that track blew up like crazy. Had the memorable hook with the stomping drums, sampled from Billy Squier. I was too young to understand the grime movement and how important Dizzee’s success was to it. I just knew that there was this guy existing in the world, out and about with these new songs. And it felt that as soon as 2003 ended and 2004 began, there he was again with this new song called ‘Stand Up Tall’. Hopefully someday an actual high-quality video for the song will arrive on YouTube. For now, it looks like we’ll have to do with the 240p quality that’s available for the time being.

‘Stand Up Tall’ was released as the first single from Dizzee Rascal’s second album Showtime, released in the summer of 2004. I won’t lie to you and say it’s an album I know inside out. I listened to it in full once in about 2015/16 and have proceeded to forget how most of it goes. It was very much critically acclaimed at the time, but a lot of the attention to this day goes to its predecessor. And I mainly remember its singles that were released in its era. But ‘Stand Up Tall’ was the one to mark Dizzee’s return, even if he never really left, and here he was with the bigger-budget music video filmed somewhere in the US, but making sure that you knew he was from London/UK with the predominant showing of the Union Jack, the silver hackney carriage, and the ladies dressed in attire typical of the English capital.

I never saw the music video repeatedly like it usually goes with many of the songs I’ve written about on here. I maybe saw it once or twice on the TV. I instead got well-accustomed to ‘Stand Up Tall’ through its inclusion on the FIFA Street soundtrack. Many weekends were spent playing that one. As was the practice for the company, the track was censored in places – muting the mention of ‘Chinese [zoots]’ and the line about stretching ‘the [arsehole] without straining’. This was the version of the song that I knew for the longest time. When it comes to what the song’s about, well, it’s just Dizzee saying that he’s representing London, stating that he’s got love for his people living in all areas of the UK, warning any haters to not try anything with him ’cause he’ll retaliate, and telling people to get on the dancefloor when his song’s playing and to stop the tough-guy pretenses. And also there’s the message to be confident in yourself and do your best. All delivered along a hectic beat with whirring synths and plucky pizzicato strings.

#1269: They Might Be Giants – Stand on Your Own Head

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Nearing the end of They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln, the band’s second debut album released in the September of 1988, comes the song ‘Stand on Your Own Head’. Now, I’ve always thought it was a good one, and I’m sure there are a lot of Giants fans out there who feel the same way. You wouldn’t find it being regarded as a major highlight, but it’s appreciated all the same. My view, it gets a bit of a raw deal being sandwiched between two of the album’s most well-known tracks in ‘Shoehorn with Teeth’ and ‘Snowball in Hell’. I’d go for this one over the former any day, and maybe you could tell because I’m writing about ‘Stand…’ and haven’t done a post on ‘Shoehorn’.

This one here is another TMBG track mainly written by John Linnell. I’ve come to think of the lyric as some kind of wordplay exercise, taking idioms and everyday phrases and then turning them upside down. Or “on their heads”, you might say. And you can go through it line by line. At least, almost. “I like people, they’re the ones who can’t stand”, I guess is a turn on “I hate people, they’re the ones I can’t stand”. It’s a bit of stretch on my part, seeing as that’s not really an everyday phrase. But what’s more obvious comes in the lyrics for the chorus, “Stand on your own head for a change/Give me some skin to call my own”, which calls to the “Stand on your own two feet” phrase and provides a combination of “give me some skin” and “a home to call my own”. And then there’s the “You’ve made my day, now you have to sleep in it” in the second verse, a reference to making a bed and lying in it. The other parts about smoke signals and suing for custody, I’ve still not been able to pin down. But they sound good nonetheless.

The main musical highlight in this tune is the prominent feature of the banjo, which is rarely used in any other They Might Be Giants song, if it even is at all. The band’s Wiki side credited its playing to John Linnell. I never thought much of it. I listened to a podcast one day that questioned whether this credit was correct. There are TMBG songs that have Linnell playing guitar and he isn’t all that proficient in that, so it did make me wonder whether the credit was true too. But then a few years ago, a TMBG live performance from 1988 was released on YouTube, and right there in the thumbnail was Linnell with banjo in hand alongside John Flansburgh. Though whether he’s playing the intricate part during the choruses is still up for question. If you were somewhat displeased with my own take on the song, luckily I found this track-by-track breakdown of Lincoln while writing this. Linnell’s recollection of the track might just be more useful than mine.