Behind The Music With JB

In an interview with Details magazine for their July 1996 issue, Blind Melon manager Chris Jones explained that Shannon Hoon would sit on his mother's porch, singing this song over, and the family considers it a song of wonderful innocence; a song of hope. Said Jones: "He wrote it at the very end of a three-day coke binge in Indiana. During the first part I don't feel the sun's gonna come out today he was on the other side of the room, trying to see through the venetian blinds which were drawn so no light was coming in, and he was at a point where he couldn't even get up." Shannon Hoon dedicated this song to the late Kurt Cobain during the band's April 8, 1994 performance on The Late Show with David Letterman. Hoon added new lines to the song concerning Cobain's recent passing. "Soup," a song released on a later album, also addressed the musician's passing. The lyrics, "I know we can't all stay here forever so I want to write my words on the face of today and they'll paint it" are on Hoon's gravestone. If you listen to this song only through the left speaker, you will hear only the harmonica and Shannon's voice in the intro. He is truly missed. 🕊️

AC/DC - THUNDERSTRUCK
(1990)

AC/DC's Young brothers - guitarists Angus and Malcolm - wrote this song. They would often tell a story about how the song came about when Angus was flying in a plane that was struck by lightning and nearly crashed, but in the 2003 re-release of The Razors Edge, Angus explained in the liner notes: "It started off from a little trick that I had on guitar. I played it to Mal and he said, 'Oh I've got a good rhythm idea that will sit well in the back.' We built the song up from that. We fiddled about with it for a few months before everything fell into place. Lyrically, it was really just a case of finding a good title, something along the lines of 'Powerage' or 'Highway To Hell.' We came up with this thunder thing and it seemed to have a good ring to it. AC/DC = Power. That's the basic idea." According to The Story of AC/DC: Let There Be Rock, Angus Young created the distinctive opening guitar part by playing with all the strings taped up, except the B. It was a studio trick he learned from his older brother George Young, who produced some of AC/DC's albums and was in a band called The Easybeats. This song marked a return to form for AC/DC, whose previous three albums didn't generate any blockbusters. It was the song that set the tone for the album, a truly thunderous track that electrified the crowd as the opening number on The Razors Edge tour. The apostrophe-free album title gels with the song: Australians call the dark clouds of an approaching storm "the razor's edge."

LED ZEPPELIN - WHOLE LOTTA LOVE

This blistering track from Led Zeppelin's second album contains some of Robert Plant's most lascivious lyrics, culled from the blues. It's not poetry, but he gets his point across quite effectively, letting the girl know that he's yearning, and ready to give her all of his love - every inch.
Plant's lyrics are based on a 1962 Muddy Waters song written by Willie Dixon called "You Need Love," where Waters sings:

I ain't foolin', you need schoolin'
Baby, you know you need coolin'
Woman, way down inside

The band reached an agreement with Dixon, who used the settlement money to set up a program providing instruments for schools.

The 1966 Small Faces song "You Need Loving" also coped from Dixon's song, and those lyrics are more similar to what Plant used. In that one, Steve Marriott sings:

I ain't foolin', woman you need coolin'
I'm gonna send you, right back to schoolin'
Way down inside your heart, woman
You need lovin'

STONE TEMPLE PILOTS - PLUSH

The lyrics were inspired, in part, by an unfortunate news story in Stone Temple Pilots' hometown of San Diego, California about a missing young woman who was later discovered dead by local law enforcement ("And I feel, when the dogs begin to smell her...").

At a concert in Columbus, Ohio on May 17, 2008, lead singer Scott Weiland said that he and STP drummer Eric Kretz wrote the lyrics in a hot tub after hearing the story. Weiland has described the song as "a metaphor for a lost obsessive relationship."
This was STP's breakthrough hit off of their major label debut album. Like all of their songs of the era, it is a band composition. When Songfacts spoke with drummer Eric Kretz in 2013, he said it was a very collaborative and energetic time for the band in terms of songwriting. "There was enthusiasm and excitement and everyone was in the room and participating creatively, artistically," he explained. "It's the most fun time to be in a band when everyone has the same ideas and everyone has the same goals."
Bassist Robert DeLeo came up with the riff for this song in the back of a U-Haul truck the band was using for a local tour. The song's instantly recognizable chord structure was inspired by DeLeo's love of ragtime music.
The most widely broadcast version of this song is an acoustic rendition that starts with Scott Weiland saying, "This is a song called 'Plush.'"

Thanks to "S*x Type Thing," the group was invited on the MTV metal show Headbangers Ball for an interview. Guitarist Dean DeLeo suggested that he bring his acoustic guitar so they could perform this song on the show, and the network agreed.

The show was recorded on December 5, 1992 after the band had finished a month of concerts opening for Rage Against the Machine. They took a plane to New York and ingested some pills to help them sleep. When they got to their hotel, DeLeo and Weiland both got sick, but they made it to the MTV Studios for the 6 a.m. taping, as Weiland recalled, "high as zombies."

In this altered state, DeLeo and Weiland performed the song, delivering a far more relaxed and poignant version than is heard on the album. This version also turned out to be quite radio-friendly, and lots of stations started playing it. This version made #39 on the US Airplay chart on August 14, 1993 and stirred a great deal of interest in the band, although listeners who bought the Core album expecting similarly mellow fare were in for an unpleasant surprise.

In America, no singles from Core were made available for purchase, since Atlantic Records liked selling $16 albums more than $2 singles.
The title never appears in the lyric, which is also true of the Core tracks "S*x Type Thing" and "Naked Sunday."

The line, "Where you going with the mask I found?" is often misheard as "Where you going with the master plan?" >>
Scott Weiland told the English music publication NME that the band's name came from Scientifically Treated Petroleum - petrol. He explained: "STP came from the image of STP oil treatment, which was always a powerful image. Richard Petty, the famous NASCAR racing driver, had the STP logo on his car and he was always a sort of renegade. We were Shirley Temple's P***y but we had to change. I think it was Dean (Deleo - STP guitarist or Robert (DeLeo - STP bassist) who said, 'How about Stereo Temple Pirates?' and then we decided on Stone Temple Pilots. It wasn't a very quick process."
This won the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocal. It's the group's only Grammy win.
Core was the only STP album where vocalist Scott Weiland was identified only by his last name. Some critics took this as a sign of pretense, mocking it in reviews that compared the band unfavorably to the likes of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Nirvana. With many grunge bands being snatched up by record labels and foisted on the public at this time, it's understandable why critics were wary, but the Core album would later be vindicated as a classic of the era.
The video was directed by Josh Taft, who also did the videos for "S*x Type Thing" and "Lady Picture Show." The "Plush" video got a lot of airplay on MTV and earned Stone Temple Pilots the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in 1993.
When they made the Core album, Stone Temple Pilots were motivated by fear they wouldn't get a chance to make another one. "When you get signed to a major label, it's scary, and you don't know what's going to happen next," Robert DeLeo told Songfacts. "So it was great that that first record allowed us to make a second one, and a third one. I look at that as a really good time right then. Ambitious."

TEARS FOR FEARS - MAD WORLD

This song is about a depressed young person who feels out of place in this world. He sees life as being empty, and looks for ways to escape the pain. The line, "The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" suggests thoughts of su***de, but according to Roland Orzabal, who wrote the lyrics, it relates to the psychologist Arthur Janov's idea that our most dramatic dreams release the most tension. So, the guy in the song isn't necessarily looking to die - he wakes up from morbid, lucid dreams feeling better.
Roland Orzabal came up with this song when he was living in an apartment in Bath, England, with his girlfriend, Caroline, who later became his wife. She was working three jobs so he could work on his music (a keeper, for sure!). Orzabal spent a lot of time strumming his acoustic guitar while staring out the window, watching people go about their business. "It's a bizarre viewpoint to watch people go about their daily routine, having to work for a living when you're sitting in a flat, unemployed," he told Top 2000 a gogo. "That's where it came from."
This was written by Roland Orzabal but sung by the group's other vocalist, Curt Smith, who connected with the tune right way. He explained it "was easy for me to sing because I could relate to Roland's lyrics. We were both the middle of three sons and had been brought up by single mothers with absent fathers. My father always worked away, and died when I was 17, but I hated him by that point. It hit me later in life, but back then I was teenage and angry. The song was the perfect platform. It worked better with my voice because it's more melancholic, darker."
Orzabal, then 19 years old, wrote the song on an acoustic guitar after hearing Duran Duran's "Girls On Film." He explained: "I just thought: 'I'm going to have a crack at something like that.' I did and ended up with 'Mad World.' It sounded pretty awful on guitar, though, with just me singing. However, we were fortunate enough to be given an opportunity by a guy called Ian Stanley to go to his very big house and muck about on his synthesizer. Ian became our keyboard player and he had a drum machine, too. All we needed was someone who knew how to work it. Eventually, we made the first demo of 'Mad World' still with me singing. But I didn't like it. So I said to Curt: 'Look, you sing it.' And suddenly it sounded fabulous."
This was Tears For Fears' first hit in their native UK, where they soon became a top act of the '80s. In America, "Mad World" went nowhere, but two songs from their next album, "Shout" and "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," went to #1. "Mad World" gradually came to the attention of American listeners, but very few of them knew about it when it was first released.

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There is a striking dissonance between the upbeat, forward-leaning music and the darkly serious lyric, which was typical of the Tears For Fears approach: they would juxtapose very intense lyrics with a pop sound.

That dissonance was eliminated by Gary Jules, an American singer who recorded a slow, melodic version in 2001 that went to #1 in the UK. Many feel his rendition is more in keeping with the lyrics. Others believe the original to be ironic, and that is lost in the Gary Jules version.
In a 2013 interview with The Guardian, Orzabal said of the timeless nature of the song: "'Mad World' hasn't dated because it's expressive of a period I call the teenage menopause, where your hormones are going crazy as you're leaving childhood. Your fingers are on the cliff and you're about to drop off, but somehow you cling on."
When Tears for Fears' first two singles failed to chart, there was talk of their record label, Phonogram, dropping them. Fortunately, Dave Bates, a shrewd A&R man at the company, listened to their new song "Mad World," slated to be a B-side, and convinced the duo it was hit material. The duo's Curt Smith told The Quietus in 2013: "Us and Dave actually believed that it was the coolest sounding thing on the album because it was very, very different. But it's pretty dark. The reason we released it was that we felt it would give us credibility. I always thought it would just take time. I honestly felt the quality was there. It was just a question of finding the right breakthrough."
The song was also influenced by the English synthpop group Dalek I Love You, whose songs tapped into Orzabal's lifelong struggles with depression: "One of their lyrics went something like, 'I believe the world's gone mad,' which summed up my feelings of alienation from the rat race. I had suffered from depression in my childhood. My dad had been in the second world war, had electric shock treatment, suffered from anxiety and was abusive to my mum. I kept a lid on my feelings at school but, when I was 18, dropped out of everything and couldn't even be bothered to get out of bed. I poured all this into the song."
Before forming Tears For Fears, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith were in a traditional 5-piece band called Graduate. When they heard acts like Gary Numan and Depeche Mode create powerful soundscapes with drum machines and synthesizers, they realized they could scale down to a duo record that way, which they did on their first album, The Hurting. "Mad World," which is part of that album, is driven by a synth bass with drum machines forming the rhythm.
This was produced by Chris Hughes, a former drummer with Adam and the Ants.
Most of the music video features Curt staring mournfully out of a window while Roland dances outside, but a short birthday party scene includes the duo's real friends and family, including Curt's mother and his then-wife Lynne.
Gary Jules covered this for the 2001 movie Donnie Darko. The director Richard Kelly hoped to end the film with the U2 track "MLK," but he couldn't afford the rights. So composer Michael Andrews and childhood friend Gary Jules made a rough recording of this Tears for Fears song to see if Kelly thought it would be suitable. Kelly was so impressed that he used that same recording on the film.
The Paul Simon song "Still Crazy After All These Years" was an inspiration for the lyric. In that song, Simon sings:

I'll sit by the window and watch the cars
I'm sure I'll do some damage one fine day
Jules' version was the surprise UK Christmas #1 of 2003, holding off The Darkness and Ozzy & Kelly Osbourne. >>
The video for Gary Jules' version was directed by Michel Gondry (The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind). Speaking to AOL Music in 2011, Jules explained the clip was conceived wholly by the French director. "Working with him was humbling," he said. "So easy. What I loved about his vision was that he didn't try to tell you anything about how mad the world is. No news clippings, no snide quips or saccharine melodrama. No tanks, no soundbites, no politics. Just universal images, art, life. More powerful than any issue-oriented sentiment."
Wondering what Tears for Fears think of Jules' version? Not only does Orzabal love it, he cites the cover's leap to #1 as the proudest moment of his career, saying, "I was in my 40s and had forgotten how I felt when I wrote all those Tears for Fears songs. I thought, 'Thank God for the 19-year-old Roland Orzabal. Thank God he got depressed.'"

Smith is also a fan, but points out a lyrical discrepancy in Jules' rendition. "Gary Jules sang 'enlarging your world' at one bit, but the correct lyric is actually 'Halargian world,'" he explains. "Producer Chris Hughes had a running joke in the studio about this made-up planet and a catchphrase: 'Oh, that's so Halargian.' I put it in the song, and it sounded right."