This is sort of a continuation of the Music of My Life feature. It focused on music from 1970-2025. It featured tunes that have special meaning to me, brought back a certain memory or a tune that I just really like. I found that with the first three decades, there were songs that I didn’t feature. So I sat down with my original lists and selected some songs that “bubbled under,” so to speak.
I figured a good way to present them was to focus on a decade. 10 years = 1 song per year = 10 songs. Last week we looked at the 90’s. This week I have 10 more from the 90’s. Next week we’ll move to the 2000’s. So, let’s check out a few “Decade Extras.”
1990
To kick off the decade, I chose a song that is still played today and remains one of the most requested songs at parties and weddings. When Vanilla Ice hit the scene, many people mocked him, but all these years later, his song Ice Ice Baby remains a favorite.
In a 2016 interview, he explained that the song was based on a real life scenario. “The song tells you the story. It’s me, with my top down, in my 5.0 Mustang, cruising down A1A Beachfront Avenue. It’s a weekend experience that turned into an amazing song. It’s timeless. I still love singing it, and it never gets old.”
The song samples “Under Pressure” from Queen and David Bowie. Songfacts.com says: Vanilla Ice never got permission to use it. No lawsuit was filed, but it is likely that Vanilla Ice agreed to pay Queen and Bowie a settlement. According to industry insider Hans Ebert, Brian May of Queen first heard this song in a disco in Germany. He asked the DJ what it was, and learned that it was #1 in the US.
Ice Ice Baby
1991
In 1991, I was working at my first country station. I was familiar with many of the legends that were mixed into the playlist like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. My dad listened to many of them, so I heard them, too.
The song Get Rhythm was a Johnny Cash song from 1956 as the B-side to I Walk The Line. Johnny’s music has influenced many an up and coming country singer. In 1991, Martin Delray decided to cover the song for his debut album. It had to be a thrill for Delray to have Johnny sing with him on the track AND appear in the music video.
I’ve always loved this song.
Get Rhythm
1992
Annie Lennox is best known for being in the 1980’s group the Eurythmics. It was her extremely successful and inventive duo with Dave Stewart. In early 1990, the group split and Lennox took time off to work on charitable endeavors and focus on her home life. In 1992 she released her first solo album, Diva.
The third single from the album was Walking on Broken Glass. Pop Matters Magazine described the song as a “gloriously weird pop song with one of the oddest intros: prancing strings, strutting keyboards, and the enigmatic line”. It went on to claim that “all of that make the track sound like nothing else on pop radio in 1992.” Honestly, I think that is why I like the song – it stood out.
The video was based on the 1988 movie Dangerous Liaisons, with elaborate costumes inspired by film, which was set in France during the 1700s. Annie Lennox recalled the song’s video in a blog promoting her 2009 greatest hits album:
“This was a wonderful video to create. There were some wonderful people involved – John Malkovich and Hugh Laurie (before he had an American accent)! That was tremendous fun. The idea of it being a period piece, like Les Liaisons Dangereux. The alternative title for ‘Broken Glass’ could easily have been ‘Hell hath no more fury than a woman scorned.’ The video is very wry and tongue-in-cheek. People can take me a little seriously sometimes, but I do actually have a rather radical sense of humor.”
Walking on Broken Glass
1993
Karaoke introduced me to the Gin Blossoms. I was going out the the bars a lot around this time and every once in a while someone would sing one of their songs. When I started driving for EDS and listening to the radio, I heard them much more.
Found Out About You was written by Doug Hopkins for the group’s first album, 1989’s Dusted. The album, however, was on a small label and really didn’t get noticed. When the band signed to A&M, they rerecorded the song for their New Miserable Experience album and it was released as the fourth single.
Singer Robin Wilson says, “The first time we ever demo’d “Found Out About You” we knew it was a hit song. I remember that being a significant event in my mind, when we were in the studio doing that song. I was sitting out on my car and what I imagined to be a hit song was a bunch of kids dancing to it at the Devil House. We were listening to it and Bill [Leen, the bassist] looked over at me and said, “Hey, wow, this song is going to get you a lot of women, isn’t it?” I was just like “Yeah, whatever.”
I was hooked from the opening guitar…
Found Out About You
1994
I heard Round Here by Counting Crows long after it had been released. This was one of the albums that my ex loved to listen to, so I hear it on long drives a lot.
Adam Duritz wrote the song and says it is sort of autobiographical. He wrote the song when he was in college and part of a band called the Himalayans. Members of that group helped with some lyrics and the music. When he formed Counting Crows, he brought the song with him and they reworked it a bit. Wanting to give everyone their due, Adam made sure to credit everyone in both bands with writing the song, so “Round Here” has eight different writers listed on the composer credits.
Songfacts.com says, The theme of childhood promises not panning out is one that shows up a lot in Duritz’ lyrics. In the chorus of this song, he lists some sayings that our parents often say: “Around here we always stand up straight,” “Around here we’re carving out our names.”
Adam says, “You’re told as a kid that if you do these things, it will add up to something: you’ll have a job, you life. And for me, and for the character in the song, they don’t add up to anything, it’s all a bunch of crap. Your life comes to you or doesn’t come to you, but those things didn’t really mean anything. By the end of the song, he’s so dismayed that he’s screaming out that he gets to stay up as late as he wants and nobody makes him wait; the things that are important to a kid – you don’t have to go to bed, you don’t have to do anything. But they’re the sort of things that don’t make any difference at all when you’re an adult. They’re nothing.”
Round Here
1995
When You Say Nothing At All was originally a hit for country singer Keith Whitley in 1988. It was co-written by Paul Overstreet. I had played it when I was at that first country station. I thought it was a great song lyrically, but wasn’t a fan of his voice. He died in 1989 of alcohol poisoning.
When some of Whitley’s friends decided to put together a tribute album to Whitley, they had other singers recording his songs. It was Alison Krauss who chose to cover “When You Say Nothing At All.
When I heard her version of the song, it stopped me in my tracks. Her voice is so beautiful and perfectly fit the song. Her voice took the song to an entirely different level. She knocked it out of the park!
When asked by Songfacts what he thought of the Krauss version, Overstreet said when he first heard it, “All the hair stood up all over my body. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me!?’ She sang it great.” It still gives me goosebumps!
When You Say Nothing At All
1996
I think whenever guys have a “guy’s night” or gals have a “gal’s night” they begin to talk and tell stories. “My wife/girlfriend does that, too!” or “Why is it that all men keep shirts or socks with holes in them?” You know, that kind of thing.
I have been guilty of asking male friends, “How come they can do that and we can’t?” It all falls into that “Battle of the Sexes” thing. Music has focused on those male/female differences for years, but I hadn’t heard it put the way Mindy McCready did in 1996.
It was at my second country station that I heard “Guys Do It All The Time.” It is the ultimate switcheroo song from the woman’s point of view. The song itself does a great job in conveying this, but the video only enhances it with gal’s doing guy things.
I saw Mindy in passing at a Radio Seminar, and she was even more beautiful in person. It was sad to see her life spiral out of control before her passing.
Guys Do It All The Time
1997
Picture it – you are getting ready to go on a trip or maybe you are being shipped off for the military. This is the last night you will be with your special someone for a while. You’d want it to last forever and make it special right? That’s the premise of Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry. He wants to cherish this one last night spent with his love. He explains that you can’t fight changes, all you can do is accept them.
This was the last song Cherry wrote for his debut album and he wanted it to be special, “something that would stand the test of time.” He achieved his goal – two decades later, the song is still in rotation on throwback radio stations and is a fixture on the setlists of countless cover bands.
Songfacts says that the black-and-white music video was filmed in Sweden and follows Cherry in the roles of several different characters whose lives intersect, including an amiable young man, a bespectacled butcher, a robber, a truck driver, a busker, and a homeless man.
Cherry is actually a trained actor, having attended New York City’s School of Performing Arts, with credits that include a bit part on The Cosby Show and a stint as an ex-con on the short-lived TV drama South Beach.
Save Tonight
1998
Another song that really stood out to me on the radio was Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. That opening guitar always seemed to cut through whatever was going on. It was almost hypnotic.
Songfacts says that lead Goo Johnny Rzeznik wrote this song for the movie City Of Angels, where it is sung from the perspective of Nicolas Cage’s character. In the film, Cage plays an angel sent to help humans make their transition to the afterlife. When he falls in love with a human (played by Meg Ryan), he must choose between love and eternal life.
Johnny explained how the film influenced the song: “I was thinking about the situation of the Nicolas Cage character in the movie,” he said. “This guy is completely willing to give up his own immortality, just to be able to feel something very human. And I think, ‘Wow! What an amazing thing it must be like to love someone so much that you give up everything to be with them.’ That’s a pretty heavy thought.”
Iris was nominated for Grammys in the categories Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Pop Performance By Duo Or Group. It didn’t win any of them.
Iris
1999
It was around 1998-1999 that I took a leap of faith after deciding to give up on radio. I had received a call from a station in the Flint area. They had called the Detroit country station that I had just resigned from asking if they knew anyone who wanted full time work. The boss talked me up and gave them my number. It was from there that I would spend the next 10-12 years working full time in Country radio.
LeAnn Rimes was making quite a name for herself around this time. She had burst on the scene in 1996 with her debut single “Blue.” She was only 13 years old at the time!
In 1999, she recorded an album of country cover songs. It included Patsy Cline’s Crazy and She’s Got You, Hank Williams Your Cheating Heart and Lovesick Blues, and other classics. The album was entitled “LeAnn Rimes” and was her fourth studio album.
If you have ever been in a situation where your lover broke up with you, only to begin dating one of your closest friends, you know how much that hurts. How do you handle that situation? In country radio, you write a hit song about it. That song was only original song on the album – Big Deal.
What I loved about the song is the slow and deliberate opening verse. It almost has a gospel song feel to it. She is lamenting about letting her man get away and eventually winding up with her friend. Then the tempo kicks in and she let’s her rival have it. She’s tired of her bragging …
Big Deal
And that is a wrap on the 1990’s. You may remember that the further along I got in the original series the less songs I was able to come up with. I think I have enough to look at the early 2000’s and officially put this feature to bed. Next week we’ll glace at 2000-2009. I hope you’ll come back then.
Thanks for reading and listening!
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 