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Song Stories

“Grip Like a Vice”

The Go! Team | 2007

Lead "cheerleader" Ian Parton created this pastiche using vocal samples from a 1985 documentary, found sounds and live drums. "Most Go! Team songs are about four or five different ideas stapled together, normally from widely divergent sources," Parton explained. "On this song, I was really interested in how super-cheeky kind of electro early-Eighties kind of rock-party song could be welded onto something with a more kind of dark, garage-y, Sonic Youth-y kind of feel, as well." He also experimented with "sassy Eighties lady rapping rubbing shoulders with discordant warped guitars," which was "uncharted territory" for him.

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“The '59 Sound”
The Gaslight Anthem | 2008
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“Casey Jones”
The Grateful Dead | 1970

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Song Stories

“1999”

Prince | 1982

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.

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