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#954: The Who – Now I’m a Farmer

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Released on the band’s Odds & Sods compilation in 1974, The Who’s ‘Now I’m a Farmer’ is certainly one of the oddest songs the band had ever made, especially once you consider that the rather introspective and ambitious Quadrophenia rock opera had been their most recent work and out for almost a year by the time of the compilation’s arrival. The song’s origins went as far back as 1968 when Pete Townshend was in the early stages of writing Tommy. You can kind of hear the similarity between the melody of the verses in ‘Farmer’ and ‘Christmas’ from Tommy. It didn’t make it onto that album. It was then recorded in 1970 for an EP that then didn’t see the light of day. And so, left on the cutting room floor, no one except the band knew of the song’s existence for another four years.

In Townshend’s words, the song is a drug one, but you wouldn’t be able to tell because the lyrics generally concern vegetables and corn and cereal and other usual farming activities. In my opinion, the song’s always been about how great farming is and the delight that one can take from it, and there are several points in the track that can back that idea up. It’s a strange topic to choose for The Who, but it was also written during a period where the band were writing songs about dog racing and spirituality, so it seemed that it was just a case of “anything goes”. I don’t know if The Who have ever been considered pretentious at any point in their history, maybe so with all the rock operas and the concept albums, but it’s a track like this that shows that the group could always bring out humour in their music and not take things too seriously.

Unlike other Who songs of the ’70s, this one’s a little less electric-guitar centric. Townshend is present, more so on the acoustic, and instead the rhythm is provided by the great piano work of Nicky Hopkins. He wasn’t a member of the group, but whenever he was on a Who track he could always make them that much better. Same applies here. Look out for those runs he pulls off on the keys. In fact, on the original mix his piano is a lot more upfront in the mix with Keith Moon’s drums pushed way to the back. I’m more accustomed to the ’90s mix, so that difference always sounded unusual to me. It’s down below, select your preference.

#842: OK Go – A Million Ways

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You didn’t know OK Go had another dancing video, did you? No, it’s always been the one with the treadmills that got all the attention. Well, here in the UK at least, ‘A Million Ways’ came before ‘Here It Goes Again’ by at least a year or something. Though the latter was the video that skyrocketed OK Go’s name in the business, and got them doing the treadmill act at the MTV VMAs in 2006, ‘A Million Ways’ was probably the track that really started it all.

This was the first track I ever heard/saw by OK Go. Didn’t know that they had something of a hit with ‘Get Over It’ in 2002. The video showed up on the Amp music channel. All I know was that there were these four men dancing this somewhat elaborate routine. To a ten-year-old me, I thought it was truly captivating stuff. I probably didn’t catch the music as much, but I certainly couldn’t forget the video. The band held a contest on YouTube allowing people to do the ‘Million Ways’ routine. If I had been older and had friends who were into the same music as me, I could have done it. I do remember doing the dance at primary school, just at playtime or whatever. People thought it was funny. It’s not that great doing it solo though.

For a while there in 2006, OK Go was one of my favourite bands. YouTube was now a thing and you could watch music videos on there, it was pretty revolutionary at the time. During that time, I found the video for ‘Invincible’, ‘Do What You Want’ was a single and appeared on the soundtrack for Burnout Revenge. All these songs I liked. ‘Here It Goes Again’ and its success capped off that good year for the band.

#840: DJ Shadow – Midnight in a Perfect World

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Mood music at its finest. Took me a real long time to finally get this track. I’d had Entroducing….. in my library since 2014, and my initial reason for downloading it was because I needed some instrumentals for my uni radio show. Plus it’s regarded as one of the best instrumental hip hop albums of all time, so I thought it was worth the time. One – I don’t think I used any tracks from there on my show, and two – I sat through it once and as time went on I pretty much forgot all the stuff on there. I kept the album on the laptop though. It’s meant to be a classic, so maybe I would get it some day.

Fast forward to 2019, and I was going through my library deleting songs/albums that I really didn’t listen to. Needed to free up some space. Entroducing….. was next up, but I listened through it just to come to a final decision. And for whatever reason, maybe it was that I had gotten older and paid more attention to albums, I don’t know. But I definitely liked the album a lot more. ‘Midnight in a Perfect World’ was the clear standout. It’s so good that its keyboard/piano sample appears twice on the album, the first time in ‘Transmission 2’. ‘Midnight’ is so calming, so nocturnal and atmospheric. I had to add it to my phone immediately. And thus it saved the whole of Endtroducing….. from being deleted.

I went to Berlin with a few friends a couple months after that all happened. It was pouring rain from the moment we landed, and once we got to our accommodation and unpacked our things, we went to go around for a walk. Just to get a grasp of the new surroundings and stuff. The rain fell, the skies were grey, it was quiet too, barely any cars around and we weren’t talking so much. And suddenly that loop from ‘Midnight’ just started playing in my head over and over. Seemed to be the perfect music for that moment in time. I’ll always think of Berlin and its not so great weather when I hear this song.

#792: They Might Be Giants – Madam, I Challenge You to a Duel

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Back in 2015, They Might Be Giants revived their iconic Dial-A-Song system, but delivered it in a very different way. Starting from the first week of January, the group released one new song every week. When they were done, the majority of the 52 songs were released on three albums: 2015’s Glean, Why?, and the following year’s Phone Power.

‘Madam’ was the second song in that 52-week run. It was an exciting time for a They Might Be Giants fan. I vaguely remember listening to the track on the day of its initial release thinking it was okay. It wasn’t until I gave Glean a full listen some time later that I truly appreciated it. Here’s a song in which John Flansburgh, who takes on this viewpoint of a very formal person, challenges a lady to a duel which you’re not really meant to do as a person of a high status. The band have always been good at building narrators up one way and then suddenly switching the narrative to make them look like terrible people.

This is a majorly piano-led track by the group, which is a bit rare for them. I think that’s what got to me when I originally heard it in 2015. Flansburgh sings with a breathy, kind of deep tone to his voice, which he would employ a lot of times on older albums, but I guess aging would affect your vocal range. The song just sounds good, you know? It’s like a soundtrack to a quaint ball, or something. Out of 910 songs on This Might Be a Wiki, the track is rated #488 by TMBG fans. That more or less categorises it as one of the average They songs. A bit unfair, I would say. I enjoy it a lot.

#775: The Darkness – Love Is Only a Feeling

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The Darkness was probably the first rock band I ever got into. I believe this is a statement I’ve said a few times before along this long road I’ve chosen to go down, but I haven’t looked back to see exactly where. As an eight-year-old going on nine, I can still remember the group being one of the most popular in the UK during 2003-04. ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’ was massive. Initially, I thought it was a joke song because… just watch the damn music video. But I actually sat down and fully took it in one day and it suddenly clicked. And I still don’t think the tag of a band you shouldn’t take seriously had gone even when they released ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)’ later that year, a song that I wanted to be number 1 in the charts but was beaten by the ‘Mad World’ cover by Gary Jules.

‘Love Is Only a Feeling’ was released as the final single from Permission to Land in March 2004, and I think it was this song and its great video that convinced me to ask my older cousin to get the album for me as a birthday gift. The track is an emotional power ballad. Not so much the chugging rocker of ‘Thing Called Love’, ‘Feeling’ is led by these emphatic guitar downstrokes and dueling/harmonising guitar solos that appear throughout. The track’s meaning is very much clear in the title. Singer Justin Hawkins says it’s about how wonderful love can make you feel, but how it can also be a danger too. It’s a song that’s really from the heart, and I think that’s what really attracted me to it all that time ago. Any reservations I had about the band not being very serious about their stuff was gone. This song was really good. Still is almost 20 years later.