Albums In The Day: The Records Of My Life - Pt. 6

Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes (1983)

Amazing what short-lived mid-90's TV shows can dredge up back into the mainstream consciousness. Though I've lived in Wisconsin all of my life I had never really heard of the Violent Femmes until My So-Called Life (the show that catapulted Claire Danes and Jared Leto into stardom) featured "Blister In The Sun" in an episode. My aunt Mich and I were driving down the Beltline in Madison around that time and WMAD played "Blister In The Sun" and Tracy Chapman's "Gimme One Reason" consecutively on the radio. Mich liked the Chapman track immediately, where as her reaction to the Femmes amounted to "my goodness, what the heck was the racket?" We get to Best Buy, she wants to pick up the CD with "Gimme One Reason" on it, except she missed the DJ saying who was who and what the name of the song was. So she picks up the Violent Femmes CD by mistake (that's my aunt for ya), plays it once when we got back to my Grandma's, and subsequently gave it to me. I hadn't heard anything other than "Blister" at the time, so I popped it into my Discman and checked it out. To this day I'm glad my aunt did that, otherwise I may never have known the snide and cynical joys of "Kiss Off" and "Add It Up" or the longing passages of "Please Don't Go" and "Prove My Love" or the xylophone-driven bop of "Gone Daddy Gone" (which was later covered by Gnarls Barkley). Classic, classic stuff.

Give It A Try:
"Blister In The Sun"
"Kiss Off"
"Add It Up"
"Gone Daddy Gone"
"Prove My Love"