How many bands these days can go five songs deep on an album? You’ve gotta hand it to Adam Levine and company for making one of the better pop albums of the past 2 years or so with “It Won’t Be Soon Before Long”. There have also been a couple of interesting videos, such as the airport fantasy of “Makes Me Wonder” and the mini-action movie of “Wake Up Call”. Their last single, “If I Never See Your Face Again” was a funked-up jam that featured an unnecessarily shoehorned-in Rihanna, and now they’re back in ballad territory with “Goodnight, Goodnight”.
This was always one of my least favorite songs from the album, partially because the lyrics are a bit trite, partially because the song’s into rips off 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite” (seriously…no one recognized the similarity?), but it’s grown on me significantly over the past couple weeks. And while I’d have much rather seen “Can’t Stop”, “Nothing Lasts Forever” or “Better That We Break” released as singles, I’ve also gotta admit that this is a pretty good video. Check it out for yourself.
By the time “Just Be Good To Me” hit the R&B charts in 1983, it looked like all The S.O.S. Band was going to show for their years of toiling in the Atlanta music scene was the 1980 disco smash “Take Your Time (Do it Right)”. Two albums worth of follow-ups had come and gone while making little noise.
S.O.S. then became one of the first artists to benefit from the magic touch of Time members Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. The budding producers laced S.O.S. with a nasty midtempo groove, complete with a blazing guitar solo on the unedited (9 minute!!) version. Add in slightly eyebrow-raising lyrics (the song’s protagonist shrugs her man’s infidelity off, singing “I don’t care about the other girls…just be good to me”), and you have the makings of a classic. This was the beginning of a very fruitful 3-year relationship between Jam, Lewis & the band, which resulted in a handful more R&B classics, such as “Tell Me if You Still Care”, “Just the Way You Like It”, “No One’s Gonna Love You” and “The Finest”. For a time, S.O.S. was a mainstay on the R&B charts, even if none of these songs made it to the Top 40 pop back in the days when you had to “cross over”. Although Jam & Lewis’s production career has become legendary in the past quarter century, this, their first major hit, remains one of their all-time best songs.
Player’s 1977 Self-Titled Debut AlbumWho knew that a shaggy mop or an old fashioned feather duster could inspire such an emotional response, but in the new ads for Swiffer, I actually feel for them – no matter how much the folks at Proctor & Gamble want me not to. Of course, my reaction has everything to do with the ads’ use of Player‘s disco-era soft-rock chestnut “Baby Come Back”, and the urgent harmonies with which the band beg forgiveness – you can blame it all! on! me! I was wrong – on behalf of obsolescent cleaning supplies everywhere. The best spot features an unsuspecting Swiffer-iffic housewife peaking out the window to find a sombrero-sporting trio serenading her with a mariachi style version of the song, and a feather duster peaks out sheepishly from behind one of their legs. The poor thing reminds me of the look on my dachsund’s face after we’ve scolded him for doing a #2 on the livingroom carpet. With the anthropomorphizing power of classic 70s pop/rock songcraft on the feather duster’s side, who wouldn’t give up the sleak, stylish green now-ness of the Swiffer – the cleaning supply equivalent of a Pharrell hook, perhaps – for the scruffily sincere feather duster?
The irony is that there’s really nothing at all scruffy about “Baby Come Back”, except perhaps for certain band members’ faces, circa 1977. The song opens with a cool, syncopated bassline and a tidy, just shy of uptempo, beat – the L.A. quartet had certainly absorbed some production lessons from their labelmates at RSO, the Bee Gees. The guitar harmonies on the song have an instantly identifiable, warbly tremelo effect that I don’t think I’ve ever heard on any other song, and if I had, it would almost certainly make me think of Player; and the verses have a soulfully aimless drift to them which makes the desperate pleas of the chorus that much more monumental. Unfortunately, for Player, the song proved an impossible act to follow, and while they recorded four studio albums and scored a couple of minor hit singles – their 1980 single “Givin’ It All” was a transparent rewrite of “Baby Come Back” – before they called it quits in the early 80s, Player were never able to replicate the success of their debut. Thank God for licensing.
The quartet reunited in the mid-90s and even put out a new album called Lost in Reality in 1996 for the River North label. In 1998, they released an excellent best-of set which collected a handful of songs from each of their albums (including the reunion record), and, at this point, you can probably pick that up for less than the price of a Swiffer Duster.
