How Good It Is

How Good It Is

Every week I choose a song from the 50s through the 80s and dive into its history, the story behind the song and other items of interest. Find more stuff at www.howgooditis.com

Episodes

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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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 23, 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 2, 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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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 27, 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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July 10, 2022 10 mins
When the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik first came out, I'd just left a job working in a record store and was doing some part-time work as a mobile DJ. I had a few regular gigs here and there on Long Island, which is where it's at when you do that sort of thing, because you get to know your crowd and who likes what, etc. Weddings and birthday parties, etc. were just Death on a Triscuit, because you have guests of all ...
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June 23, 2022 53 mins
This is a show that I made a long while back specifically for the Patreon crowd. Those are the folks who have been supporting the program and helping me to cover some of the hosting and other costs attached to doing the show (e.g. subscriptions, software, etc.). In fact, it was so long ago that the show's logo changed in the interim. I had to re-do the cover art to accommodate the change. (Changing the lettering is easy; the rest o...
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Hi, folks: I know, the feed has been quiet for awhile. Listen and you'll hear a little bit of the story, and what happens next. (Don't worry, I'm not quitting the show.)   
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April 17, 2022 13 mins
For the last few weeks I've been having some weird troubles with the websites for both this podcast and the other one (wordsandmovies.com, in case you didn't know), especially with the other one. Pages would load slowly on my end, or not at all, which made it very difficult for me to post anything. And in the case of this site, it rendered releasing new episodes nearly (but not completely) impossible. So, after many hours on the p...
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April 2, 2022 13 mins
If you want to get technical about it, Looking Glass was NOT a one-hit wonder. "Brandy" was, to be sure, their biggest hit and the song that most people identify with the band. But "Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne," the opening track from their second album, spent only one week less on the Billboard Hot 100 chart than "Brandy" did. Okay, it peaked at #33 while "Brandy" spent most of its chart life at or near the top, but still. "Bran...
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