Hot Hits & Misses: Franz Ferdinand, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

The Hot List has been a Rolling Stone tradition since 1986. All this week, Rock Daily takes a look back at the people and trends that stayed smoking and the ones that cooled off. Today, we visit 2005.

Hot Hit: Franz Ferdinand. Rolling Stone checked in with the boys from Franz Ferdinand on the eve of the release of their second album You Could Have It So Much Better. Though that record didn't exactly take the world by storm, the Scottish dance-rockers continue to be one of the more vital bands in indie rock, and their third album Tonight: Franz Ferdinand is one of the more hotly-anticipated releases of 2009.

Hot Miss: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Awarded the title of "Hot Indie" in '05, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah made some noise with their self-titled debut in '05, buoyed by the fact that they had managed to attain a certain level of success without the aid of a label. But their follow-up Some Loud Thunder was a non-starter (though remains an interesting mess). The band is still together, and frontman Alex Ounsworth remains one of the more interesting indie rockers out there, but it's safe to say SYHSY didn't live up to the buzz.

Related Stories:
• The 2008 Rolling Stone Hot List
• Album Review: Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better
• Album Review: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Some Loud Thunder

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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