How Good It Is
Each episode I choose a song from the 50s through the 90s and dive into its history, the story behind the song and other items of interest. Find more stuff at www.howgooditis.com
Episodes
September 18, 2024 • 17 mins
Of all the people in the Beatles' inner circle, Jane Asher is perhaps the most mysterious.
Not because she's reclusive--far from it, in fact. Jane Asher has spent lots of time on stage and on screens large and small from the time she was a child. But other than newspaper and magazine articles, and maybe a few video clips which survive from the 1960s, there isn't a lot of first-hand knowledge about her relationship with Paul McCar...
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August 2, 2024 • 11 mins
In case you haven't heard, we're on a little bit of a journey, meeting various women who have had an influence on multiple pop songs. In today's episode we'll be visiting Rosanna Arquette.
The interesting thing here is that whether or not the songs in this episode are about Rosanna has been an on-again, off-again mystery. For a while they're not, then they are again, and maybe, maybe not. Personally I think the evidence is there, ...
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July 5, 2024 • 10 mins
For the next several episodes, we're going to take a look at the women who inspired some of the Rock Era's most iconic songs.
There will be six episodes in this series; five of them will concentrate on a specific woman, each of whom inspired multiple songs. The sixth episode will look at several women who each inspired a single song. A couple of the women I've chosen will be fairly obvious but I'm hoping a couple will come as a su...
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June 16, 2024 • 14 mins
After this many episodes, it gives me a moment of "Huh, isn't that interesting" when I start writing the post for an episode and discover that I haven't covered a song from that particular year before. In this case, that year would be 1956.
In retrospect, that shouldn't be a surprise, given that we're reaching waaay back into the early days of the Pop music era. But it's still a fun little statistic, regardless.
"In the Still of ...
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April 6, 2024
This is an episode I wrote in the Southern Studio, so I may have been in a better mood than usual to write it than I ordinarily am, given the subject matter.
When Blue Öyster Cult first got together, they were a college band from Stony Brook, New York. That's not far from where I grew up. Oddly, none of the band's original members are from Long Island. Two of them grew up in New York City, one in upstate NY and the last was bor...
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January 18, 2024 • 15 mins
By 1968, Glen Campbell had moved from session musician to a star in his own right. His single "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," written by Jimmy Webb, was a huge hit for him. So when Campbell decided he needed another song, he turned back to Webb and asked him for another song.
For whatever reason, he asked Webb to make it a song about a specific location. Webb, at that time, was in the business of writing as many songs as possible ...
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December 25, 2023 • 23 mins
Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!
Today we're looking at three Christmas songs that are born from the anxieties of World War Two. Two of the songs aren't direct references to the war itself, but it clearly informed the subject. Themes of separation and loneliness emerge, and a sense of nostalgia is present throughout.
Interestingly, one of the songs was so dark that the lyricist was asked to change the words...twice. For th...
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December 22, 2023 • 16 mins
...before we were so rudely interrupted...
This is a song that I'm long-overdue in covering, if only because of the backstory it has. It's simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking. It's a love letter from lyricist Doc Pomus to his wife. That's not unusual, of course. Many songwriters compose songs dedicated to a loved one. But this one has an extra special twist to it. I shan't spoil it here, though: you'll have to actually...
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September 21, 2023 • 15 mins
How many times now have I gone into the backstory with a song and learned that the person who wrote it says something akin to, "Yeah, I knocked that one off in about fifteen minutes."
Oftentimes they also think that the song isn't going to amount to very much, which I find kind of funny. But it also supports a working theory I have that it's not always the song itself, but the way it's presented. The Crickets (sans Buddy Holly) an...
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August 13, 2023 • 20 mins
I don't often play favorites on this show; in fact there have been a couple of songs I genuinely disliked, but I covered them anyway because the story behind them was kind of interesting. And I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify those songs, because I do try to be even-handed.
However.
I am going to take the time to gush about "Tiny Dancer" just a little bit, because it's one of my favorite songs by Elton John, and it may ev...
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August 1, 2023
The Association was a band that just kind of floundered for awhile. First in was in their early years when they were known as simply The Men, then, in 1966 after their first album did well, the second one did...not so much.
Bones Howe
Part of the problem, it seemed, is that the band members playing their own instruments was mostly not a good idea. So for their third album, Warner Brothers (which had purchased The Association's la...
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July 6, 2023 • 20 mins
One of my favorite titles for an album comes from The Animals. They did a bunch of albums up to 1969, then for a year or two there were a couple of compilation albums after they broke up. But in 1977 the Animals reunited and released a new album, titled Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted.
I don't know what made me think of that. Anyway. (heh.)
This was one of those episodes where, the more I found, the more there was TO find....
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April 10, 2023 • 13 mins
I think that by now the Monkees have overcome their epithet of "Prefab Four," which I suppose was clever but not especially accurate. At least three of the Monkees were musicians who could act. I'd argue that Micky Dolenz was an actor who could play music. (More on that below.) Having said that, however, he's got one of the best voices of the rock and roll era, so my label comes from the fact that he came from acting rather than fr...
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February 18, 2023 • 33 mins
You might remember a few episodes back when I teamed up with Mike Messner. He's the host of the Gordon Lightfoot appreciation podcast Carefree Highway Revisited. Well, Mike is back, and this time around we're talking about Lightfoot's first big American hit, "If You Could Read My Mind."
I actually went looking around for the album that I'd first heard this song on, and it turned out that I was exactly correct about its title:
T...
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December 31, 2022 • 52 mins
To be honest, I didn't really expect both of the musicians I approached this year to be both very open to the idea of an interview and so generous with their time. But I'm definitely glad that they were, especially because you get to benefit from the chats I had with them. And during this holiday season you get two long episodes instead of one semi-long one. Win-win all around!
Brandon Walker's "Chinese Food on Christmas" isn't as...
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December 26, 2022 • 54 mins
Over the last several years, radio stations have been snapped up by large corporations. Then, as a cost-cutting measure, certain functions have been centralized. One of these has been the stations' playlists, the literal list of songs that a station has in its rotation. This has led to a homogenization of radio stations and it kind of makes them not as much fun to listen to when you travel.
That said, there are going to be variatio...
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October 27, 2022 • 11 mins
Such a life I've had lately, what with getting Covid and then getting part of the house renovated...four weeks of a two-week project. And the job isn't even done, but that's not the contractor's fault. (Replacement parts, don'tcha know.) And for some reason it's taking forever to put the kitchen—the whole downstairs, really—back together.
Anyway.
This episode takes a peek at the song that arguably became the Four Tops' sig...
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September 8, 2022 • 18 mins
If you haven't been paying attention (and, based on the download statistics, you haven't), I'm part of a second podcast, where I take on more of a support role than as the lead voice. The show is called Words and Movies, in which my partner Sean Gallagher and I choose a pair of films and find the links between them.
In an upcoming episode, we discuss a film from 2007 called Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover. There's a scene i...
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August 1, 2022 • 10 mins
Pardon my allergies; I've sounded kind of rough for a week or so. There was a lot of throat-clearing to edit out of this one. I can't even blame the Southern Studio on this one; it's the direct result of spending too much time cutting the grass at home. (And THEN I can blame the Southern Studio a little bit, because I went there the next day and it certainly didn't help matters.)
How does one spend too much time cutting the gr...
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July 19, 2022 • 70 mins
Screen capture of McCarty during our Zoom-based interview.
Jim McCarty is one of the founding members of The Yardbirds, and he's recently published his second book, She Walks in Beauty: My Quest for the Bigger Picture. It's a journey that starts with the death of his wife Lizzie and then jumps back to earlier in his life, as he examines the various things that connect us to parts of the world that are just beyond our reach.
I was...
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