Crenshaw has had a long, successful music career, but his first two albums, "Marshall Crenshaw" in 1982 and "Field Day" in 1983, are generally considered his best. For instance, the crowd-sourced review website gives the highest ratings to those first two albums by a fair margin from all the others.
But in my opinion, he has three excellent early albums. The problem is, he never released the third one. This album is mostly made a demos of songs from the year or two leading up to his first solo album. He'd been playing in bands for most of the 1970s, and even had a role playing John Lennon in the musical "Beatlemania" for a little while.
During that time, he'd written a lot of songs. It seems that after his first album was written, most of these were old and boring to him, so most of them didn't get officially released at the time. But many years later, he released an album of demos called "9 Volt Years Battery Powered Home Demos & Curios." The first five songs here come from that. The next five songs come from the 40th anniversary deluxe edition of his debut album. The three after that as bonus tracks from a different edition of the debut album. Finally, the last song is from a movie soundtrack released around that time.
The thing is, these are not really rejects. For instance, "You’re My Favorite Waste of Time" has become one of his most popular songs, and has been included on best of collections. "Something’s Gonna Happen" was the A-side to his very first release. The rest are all of a high caliber. I think only "Stop Her on Sight (S.O.S.)" is a cover. There are some other stray tracks from around this time that I didn't include (such as about half of the "9 Volt Years") because I wanted this to be a solid album through and through. In fact, in my opinion, this is my second favorite album of his, behind only his 1982 debut.
Oh, by the way, two of the songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. That's because I thought the lead vocals were a little low for those, so I used the UVR5 audio editing program to boost them relative to the instruments.
This album is 40 minutes long.
01 Run Back to You (Marshall Crenshaw)
02 Everyone's in Love with You (Marshall Crenshaw)
03 She's Not You (Marshall Crenshaw)
04 First Love (Marshall Crenshaw)
05 Bruce is King [Instrumental Version of Blues Is King] (Marshall Crenshaw)
06 Look at What I Almost Missed (Marshall Crenshaw)
07 Something’s Gonna Happen (Marshall Crenshaw)
08 You’re My Favorite Waste of Time [Edit] (Marshall Crenshaw)
09 Just Not for Me [Not for Me] (Marshall Crenshaw)
10 Never Gonna Happen (Marshall Crenshaw)
11 Starlit Summer Sky [Edit] (Marshall Crenshaw)
12 Somebody like You (Marshall Crenshaw)
13 Stop Her on Sight [S.O.S.] (Marshall Crenshaw)
14 It's Only a Movie (Marshall Crenshaw)
https://www.upload.ee/files/15438576/MarshallC_1980-1982_MyFvorteWsteofTme_atse.zip.html
The cover photo of Crenshaw was taken at the Record Plant recording studio in New York City, during the recording of his debut album in January 1982.
Awesome! Thanks Paul.
ReplyDeleteHey Paul, thanks, I love early Marshall Crenshaw.
ReplyDeleteI have a question for you, though. I've downloaded UVR5, but it seems difficult to handle, even after watching some tutorials on youtube. What models/modes do you use to boost vocals compared to instruments?
Do you think I missed any good early songs?
DeleteAs for UVR5, I tend to use two modes: VR Architecture and Demucs. VR Architecture is the easiest for just splitting into vocals and instruments. Then just boost the volume of one relative to the other. I use Demucs for splitting into bass, drums, etc... If anyone has more knowledge on using UVR5, please share. There's a lot I don't know.
Thanks for the info re/UVR5, I will try that out.
DeleteAs for MC, I'm just your regular Joe Shmoe concerning him, knoming and liking the first two albums, but haven't really ventured much in his further discography, something I no doubt should rectify one of these days.
Keep up the good work, cheers,
Simon