SLS: Brother, Don’t You Walk Away

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For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song that mentions a family member such as mom, dad, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or cousin, at the suggestion of Di of the pensitivity101 blog. Jim’s post You Can’t Pick Your Relatives tells all. I have chosen two songs for this, one each for brother and ‘mom,’ to use the American spelling (the song does, too).

I’m leading with my brother song which, although the word features in the song title and throughout, is really the more colloquial use rather than a familial one. But hey, I can choose what I like, right? This is from a favourite band of mine – I bought all of their albums back in the day and they now reside in my Apple Music library too. And it makes a serious point:

As always, although you probably won’t need them, I invite you to take a trip to genius.com for the lyrics. Brother, Don’t You Walk Away was the opening track on Zig Zag, the fourth album by The Hooters, which was released in October 1989. The album only reached #115 in the US and #59 in Canada though, like their previous releases, it did well in parts of Scandinavia, peaking at #13 in Sweden and #12 in Norway. Like all of their albums it didn’t make the UK charts at all, which I have always felt was a huge mistake on the part of the British record-buying public – I loved them, so why didn’t everyone else? This track was also released as a single, but didn’t make the charts anywhere as far as I can tell.

Brother, Don’t You Walk Away is fairly blunt in its description of the way we relate to homeless people when we see them on the street, and the video enhances the point. It was written by keyboard player Rob Hyman, guitarist Eric Bazilian and the album’s producer, Rick Chertoff. Rob takes lead vocal, and comes out from behind his keyboards to play acoustic guitar on this one.

Wikipedia, rather disparagingly to my mind, describes the album as moving “toward a more political and folk music direction, contrasting significantly with their previous light-hearted songs.” If you are familiar with their earlier song Satellite, a real favourite of mine, you’ll know that they hadn’t been afraid of taking on serious themes before: it absolutely destroys television evangelists who are only interested in making as much money as they can, with a suitably pointed video. You’ll find it here if you haven’t seen it – well worth a look.

 

 

My second song for today also has an underlying serious theme, though its treatment, especially in the video, is a little more light-hearted. You may remember this one:

Lyrics, again courtesy of genius.com, can be found here.

Fountains Of Wayne released Stacy’s Mom as a single in May 2003, ahead of its inclusion the following month on their third album, Welcome Interstate Managers. The single reached #9 in Ireland, #11 in the UK, #13 in Canada and #21 in the US, while the album peaked at #115 in the US and #160 in the UK, though it did sell around 450,000 copies in the US. As you might expect from the chart placings sales of the single were much higher: 1.2m in the UK, going double Platinum, and nearly 900,000 in the US. The song was written by the band’s bassist Adam Schlesinger and vocalist Chris Collingwood, and was inspired by a friend of Schlesinger’s when he was young, who was attracted to Schlesinger’s grandmother! It is a power pop song with which the group hoped to emulate the sound of The Cars, and I think they did a fair job of that. And they added several Cars references into the video, just for good measure. Continuing the connection with The Cars they had hoped to get Paulina Porizkova (Cars leader Ric Ocasek’s then-wife) for the title role, but instead went for Rachel Hunter, a former Mrs Rod Stewart. The video was shot in Los Angeles in late May 2003: “It was 7 a.m., and there was Rachel Hunter doing a striptease on the kitchen counter,” remembered Schlesinger. Some days are better than others!

An interesting little snippet I found was that Bowling For Soup, another band I really like, recorded a cover version of the song in 2011. They did so because there had long been confusion about whether this was actually one of their songs, which of course it wasn’t. Bowling for Soup bandleader Jaret Reddick has said that he regularly encountered fans at their concerts who mistakenly thought Stacy’s Mom was a Bowling for Soup song, and said that by finally releasing their own version of the song, “I’ve basically just taken care of a large part of the population that’s been wrong for years, and I’ve made them right.” Alluding to the mistaken identity issue, the cover art for the song release reads: “Everyone thought they did it anyway … so they freakin did it! Finally you can say this is your favourite song by BFS and not look like an idiot!” Typical BFS humour, and they have added the song to their set list for concerts since then.

That’s me done for today and I hope you enjoyed these two tunes and, if you followed the link, the bonus add-in track. My thanks as always to Jim for hosting the show, and to Di for the prompt, and I hope you have a great day. I’ll see you again for this week’s Tuesday Tunes, which is a landmark edition, so don’t miss it! Take care 😊

44 thoughts on “SLS: Brother, Don’t You Walk Away”

  1. I suppose ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ and ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ were too obvious. I had never heard either of these before, Clive, though I had heard of the band The Hooters. I’m adding ‘Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?’, from 1932.

    Best wishes, Pete.

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  4. Clive I remember The Hooters from MTV and def remember the song you linked to about televangelists. The featured song is new to me but it has their tell-tale sound, which is unique to them and honey in the ears. Not sure why I never bought one of their albums, probably because they aren’t AOR.

    I remember Stacey’s mom vaguely and I like the video except when they try to “sexualize” Stacey herself. No thanks. I do like Fountains of Wayne’s sound and have heard other songs of theirs just can’t remember which ones.

    Good choices for the prompt!

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  5. The Hooters song deserved a better fate than withering and dying on the charts. Always liked Fountains Of Wayne, this Mom one was their big hit, but ‘Red Dragon Tattoo’ is up there, ‘Little Red Light’ is way up there.

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  11. I know the Hooters were popular, but the only song I remember by them is And We Danced, but I think I heard this one before. ‘Stacy’s Mom’ was inspired because one of Adam Schlesinger’s friends that he grew up with. thought that his grandmother was hot. They were both about 11 or 12, when this friend told him that he thought his grandmother was hot.

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    • I loved The Hooters, and you have some catching up to do. Try Satellite, that I linked to. And I’ll be playing another of theirs on Tuesday.

      I mentioned that friend of Adam Schlesinger – an unusual prompt for a song!

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  12. Two excellent songs, Clive, although I didn’t know the first one. The video for Stacy’s Mom was hilarious and extremely well done. Gotta hand it to Rachel Hunter; she could really work the room …. or the massage bed or the pool! Great choices 😊 🎶

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  13. A couple of excellent choices. I had never heard Stacy’s Mom before so thanks for the intro. The world has changed and now songs like this one and Hot for Teacher etc are supposedly creepy- not to me though. I still remember being there…

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