After Brian talked about Sweet Morphine being called the worst song he had ever written, I actually looked into it. The only thing I could find was this from NJ.Com All 71 of The Gaslight Anthem's songs, ranked worst to best Sweet Morphine is ranked No. 65 (the worst four were covers - not even sure why they were included). I could see him not wanting to call out his hometown newspaper - a paper in which I'm sure praised the band for years and years. The Pitchfork 'Get Hurt' review by Ian doesn't specifically mention Sweet Morphine, and I actually googled Ian Cohen and Sweet Morphine and didn't get any results (not to say he didn't say it elsewhere - like a podcast or something) but to someone else's point on here, he seems to have respect for Ian, as he praised Pup for receiving high praise from 'respected writers like Ian.' Long Story short, this NJ article is the only thing I could think he's maybe referring to, even though it's technically not the worst song ranked. On a side note, I'm bummed that I ordered Get Hurt on vinyl last week and it wasn't the deluxe version (I wasn't even paying attention when I ordered it).
Right...the point is, that is the only thing that I could possibly find of what he's referring to. For the record, i'm on Brian's side, I love the song.
Sweet Morphine isn't even close to his worst song!!! If I ranked his songs it would be pretty damn close to the top.
Seeing these two talk made me so happy. Two of my favorite songwriters that I also never associated with each other
watched the sessions with Stefan and Andy. Brian is a really good interviewer. He should keep doing these forever. They also led me to listen to Local Honey again and I fuck with this more than I remembered.
I listened to the Andy Hull and Jake Jackson/Chris Shiflett ones. It nice to hear the mutual admiration, songs, insight and so on. I love hearing how they were able influenced too. I’d be cool if he put up some of his acoustic recordings from the show. I also am excited to hear the influences from other song writers that may appear in his music, even if it’s just from a self confidence standpoint.
Ok, so I'm reading this ranking of 71 Gaslight songs by NJ.com Comments: 1) Elvis as a BOTTOM TWO original song?? BOTTOM TWO. It's not a bottom two song on that 4-song EP !!! 2) Diner as a BOTTOM SIX original? 3) Red Violins at 60 and Selected Poems at 53 and Dark Places at 42? My lord. 4) Lots of American Slang songs waaaay too low 5) 1930 and Boxer and She Loves you in the 40s - all in my top 15 My list would look TOTALLY different for the most part. I get that everyone has different opinions and that's cool. But even within given albums, he prefers totally different songs than I do, most glaringly his rankings of Sink and Swim and Get Hurt and American Slang songs.
Me too, I mean I'd have 59 Sound and Handwritten and a few others in there for sure but those are low hanging fruit. This exercise would become near impossible for me if you included all his solo stuff too.
A rough pass had 7 songs sharing top 20, and 13 that they had lower that were in my top-20. In no order: 59 Sound Great Expectations Blue Jeans Backseat We Came To Dance Mae Here's Looking At You kid Say I Won't National Anthem Rollin' and Tumblin' Spirit Of Jazz When We Were Young 1930 Boxer Have Mercy Senor Halloween Underneath The Ground Angry Johnny Wherefore Art Thous, Elvis
My favorite memories were back in high school/college at parties with all my friends when out of nowhere someone would throw Say I Won’t on and then no matter where or what you we were doing, all of us would run into the kitchen and then start a 1 hour Gaslight sing along with 15-20 people screaming at the top of our lungs, at 2 am, drunk as hell, having the best times.
I’m so thankful lol. It took some work! When the 59’ Sound came out my brothers and a few of my friends got into them HARD. It was the night Handwritten leaked where I downloaded it on my iPod, myself and 4 other friends went to my other friend’s basement and listened to it 3 times in a row. There was a party that night and I brought my iPod and blared Handwritten all night. From that night on I got the rest of my friend group into them and Gaslight became our whole group’s band. Those shows after were the absolute best of times. Since Gaslight is pretty much done, the Menzingers are taking over in Gaslight’s absence.