The 10 best songs by Jonathan Richman
“We all just thought we were rock bands,” Jonathan Richman said in dismissal of the punk label that befell him when he offered up a hip new sound with The Modern Lovers. In typical fashion, rather than a rocker bemoaning the trifling matter of a genre label, when it comes to Richman, his rejection of punk is as charming and liberal as his laidback music. “There was no what you’d call punk,” he says. ”And if there was, nobody was flattered by the term. A punk was a guy in a street gang who took a cheap shot. A punk was not Muhammad Ali.”
“At the time it was just a strange category that I noticed when I was over in European that we didn’t have in the States. I really cared more selfishly than that. I just wanted to express myself in front of the audience and I wanted to have rock music happen,” he tells Andrew Bird. The only label that he happily applied was humbly saying that he wanted to sound like the Velvet Underground—to capture the joy of that everyday immediacy.
The slight irony is that punk really did have an incendiary intent and a massively beneficial impact on the world too whether the magnificent Richman intended it like that or not. The Dadaists of the 1920s might have dismissed the scholarly deduction that their work reflected the madness of war as an act of philosophising silliness into something more academic than it ever was. But in the broadest sense, the scholars were right, you simply can’t escape the world around you.
However, Richman proves that you can, at least, always look on the bright side of that world. Throughout his career, he has remained radically positive and stuck by the early mantra that music is a simple vessel for expression. This has led to him producing songs that defy the usual polished standards of pop and venture towards the singular world of extricated outsider music—no doubt another label that he would shrug aside. You simply sense that he is a man who loves performing and he uses that enthusiasm to illuminate the joys of the world around him.
The 10 best songs by Jonathan Richman:
10. ‘Hospital’ – The Modern Lovers (The Modern Lovers, 1976)
Compositionally, Richman has always been a fan of the great classical composers. Over the course of his work, he has always looked to usher in a sense of their chronicled exultation in his own humble output. ‘Hospital’ is a great showcase of that skill; the song builds on a brooding tonality that forever implies a billowing sense of trapped emotion that is bursting to escape the sustained chords of the organ.
This aura of emotional vigour being caged within meek confines is perfectly paired with a post-modernist quirkiness in the lyrics themselves with great lines such as: “I go to bakeries all day long / There’s a lack of sweetness in my life.” All of this is part of his joyously singular songwriting that is typified by the mysterious sentiment of the song itself: we don’t know why his lover has been hospitalised or any details at all on that front, but this odd specificity ladles lashings of honesty into the mix that most pop music sorely lacks.
9. ‘You Can’t Talk to the Dude’ – Jonathan Richman (I, Jonathan, 1992)
I, Jonathan is a masterpiece. The album is a stunning feat that always seems to haul your mood up to meet it, and that is just about one of the finest things that music can do. ‘You Can’t Talk to the Dude’ is a great exhibition of the record’s strengths. With only a few simple chords strummed out in Richman’s very own ‘Surf Rock meets Flamenco’ fashion and a stunning chorus doled out with unashamed repetition, the song alchemically alters the aura of the air around you, making things just a little more lyrical than before.
As a songwriter, Richman has a knack for creating earworms that live in your head rent free. As a result, you’ll be idly washing the dishes one day and suddenly find yourself hollering “You can’t talk to the dude, no, no,” out of nowhere. And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t bring a smile to your face.
8. ‘I Love Hot Nights’ – Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers (Modern Lovers 88, 1987)
Richman is a songwriter who comes into his own during the sunnier months, so it stands to reason that ‘I Love Hot Nights’ would rank among his best. He follows his muse through the reverie of summer days conjuring up the dalliance of sticky ice lolly sticks, grass stains on khaki, the smell of barbecues and the chill that descends on beer gardens circa 20:15—and he doesn’t even mention a single one of these specifics, however, he does such a good job of painting an expressive picture of a summer evening that you fill in the spaces with your own corroborations.
The album that spawned the song is Richman’s best of the 1980s. If an album could be made human, then Modern Lovers 88 would be some charismatic Pixar-like fellow with a beaming grin in a benevolent line of work like a nurse who hands ice cream out to the homeless. It’s sonic cherry cola on a summer day, it’s medicine on a dower Monday morning, and it’s a cinematic slow-dancing end to a superb late night. What it takes from Bo Diddley it gave back to the future of indie.
7. ‘Someone I Care About’ – The Modern Lovers (The Modern Lovers, 1976)
With swaggering energy that recalled Richman’s old favourites, The Velvet Underground, The Modern Lovers earned their proto-punk straps with ‘Someone I Care About’. However, in a brilliant meta fashion, the song is actually doubly punk by default of defying the traditions of punk. While the zeitgeist was screaming about free love and narcotic frolics, Richman was just using a few scratchy chords to tell us all about how he wants to go steady in a settled relationship.
The song still might echo Lou Reed’s ‘Vicious’, but beneath the distortion and sense of abandon is a wholesome message and that is rock ‘n’ roll epitomised in the sense that it is about celebrating your own individualism. Just because The Modern Lovers liked raucous rock, didn’t mean that when they were doling out their own strange version of it they couldn’t subvert typical tropes.
6. ‘The Morning of Our Lives’ – Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers (Roadrunner, Roadrunner, 2004)
“Our time is now, here in the morning of our lives,” is not a line you often hear crooned earnestly in the ‘cool’ world of lo-fi indie, but that’s the beauty of Richman, he’s not hung-up on, well, anything. This makes ‘The Morning of Our Lives’ come across as a gift from a friend. That home-demo feel transfigures a track that could’ve been crummy into something stirringly sweet and sincere.
What’s more, when you have a melody this beautiful, it almost calls for a simple message. The tune seamlessly tessellates with his tale of lifting spirits to create one of the most encouraging pieces of music to ever exist outside of Day Care. We all need a bit of this uplift in our lives, which is why we all need Jonathan Richman.
5. ‘Roadrunner’ – The Modern Lovers (The Modern Lovers, 1976)
As a two-chord take on The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’, this anthem heralded the simplicity of punk to come. The tale of the experience that spawned it typifies Richman: “We used to get in the car and just drive up and down Route 128 and the Turnpike,” former bandmate John Felice recalled. “We’d come up over a hill and he’d see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed. He’d see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn’t see it.”
That sense of naivety is what makes ‘Roadrunner’ soar. It is unapologetically enthusiastic and joyously simple. It is – as Johnny Thunders would say about the New York Dolls – an attitude, and a great attitude at that. The upshot of this freewheeling abandon is a sense of vigour that perfectly captures the energy of the radio on the open road. This song taps into the same magic that Hunter S. Thompson encapsulated when he wrote: “On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.” Written at 19, ‘Roadrunner’ is the fuel of youthful opportunity.
4. ‘Satisfied Mind’ – Jonathan Richman (Jonathan Goes Country, 1990)
Many things have been said about Richman’s music, but the most notable truth that you can tag on it is the beauty it contains. His melodies have the same soft touch as a light breeze at the beach. Lusciously lilting, ‘Satisfied Mind’ is a perfect example of this. Richman deftly makes Red Hays’ 1954 classic his own with a sweetly performed arrangement that whisks up an air of pillow-propped serenity.
Music rarely gets as mellowed as this. With charming vocals and ethereal notes, Richman pitches his anti-materialistic tale in a wildflower meadow on a spring day. From this perfectly painted scene, he manages to assert that the best things in life are free, and he does so in such a stirring manner that it sounds undoubtedly like the truth.
3. ‘Let Her Go Into the Darkness’ – Jonathan Richman (You Must Ask the Heart, 1995)
Contrary to the surface view of Richman, he is not a proto-punk turned upbeat acoustic songwriter with a mere childlike disposition, that is just one whisp amid his swirling wise welter. Yes, his solo music might be defiantly positive and sweetly melodic, but there is a notable sense of life at large in all of its textured guises within his music. The continental arrangement of ‘Let Her Go Into the Darkness’ might lull you into a strolling contentment, but the lyrics cast a brooding shadow on its sunny tones.
You don’t have to gloss over the potholes on memory lane to celebrate life, Richman makes that point brilliantly with his tracks. He might sweeten life with a squeeze of honeyed belle but his work is always very real, free from saccharine additives. This dark tale of a love interest’s slide from grace has similarities to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and all the experiential acuity therein.
2. ‘I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar’ – Jonathan Richman (I, Jonathan, 1992)
Richman’s entire musical outlook is typified by one single live performance of this majestic track. “What is it that makes a performance compelling?” Woody Harrelson once mused, “Well, I guess it’s just the degree of vulnerability, maybe,” he rather uncertainly concluded. Albeit he was talking about acting, in some ways, his appraisal might hold true when it comes to Richman’s performance of ‘I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar’ on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. It might not be the greatest performance of all time in terms of note-perfect majesty, but Richman knows that greatness is one thing but to be loved is quite another, and in that knowledge, he delivers quite possibly the most endearing live performance of all time.
In keeping with Harrelson’s wise words, behind all the brightly beaming high jinks of the performance, there are passing patches of shady vulnerability. However, Richman brushes these aside and basks in the sun of buzzing spotlight bravura not despite the vulnerability beneath, but in spite of it. Too many people let a notion of dignity get in the way of a good time, but not Richman—Richman strives for pure exultation and remains dignified all the same.
All of this seems perfectly in line with the song. It’s almost as though he emerged from the Lesbian Bar with some sort of sacred knowledge that eternally added a skip to his stride and a tap to his tootsies, as he bumbles around imparting the godly virtue that farting about is the meaning of life. It would seem that since leaving that mystic liberal watering hole, our little Richman vowed never to be ‘just okay’ ever again. Laissez-Faire? He gives the phrase its meaning. The industrial zone? He takes you there. Wine? It’s not even mentioned in the song but he’s somehow magically pouring you another glass.
1. ‘That Summer Feeling’ – Jonathan Richman (I, Jonathan, 1992)
This is an anthem that lays down an Excalibur for all would-be songwriters. “The trick is to say as much as possible without being explicit—without being matter of fact, just poetic detail. My favourite songs are the ones that have one or two words that bring it all home. They’re usually kind of ambiguous and strange,” Andrew Bird tells me. “Exactly like ‘Summer Feeling’ when he talks about the girl with the dirty ankles on the playground flirting with him. That is all I’m trying to do as a songwriter—find the girl with the dirty ankles.”
The beauty of the song, like much of Richman’s writing, is that he not only captures a mood with the melody, but he extolls a quirkiness that is endlessly relatable like the antithesis of of a Wes Anderson film. It’s all feeling when it comes to Richman and nothing conveys that quite like ‘That Summer Feeling’ and its unique ability to bottle up an entire season and all the sanguine sepia-toned reflection that comes with it.
Here we see the perfect trinity of his work: wonderful poetic writing, a lyrical melody that seems like it was written but rather lassoed from the passing ether at twilight in August, and a fantastic performance that is not only idiosyncratic and instantly recognisable but also brilliantly crooned and strummed with a filagreed sense of expressive texture that many heavy-handed guitarists would butcher. This is hayfever’s antidote and Richman prescribes this life-affirming medicine asking for nothing in return.
