Obscure Singles Heard at CVS

I had lunch at IHOP the other day. Usually at this one it's straight Top 40 Muzak, but for reason that day it was smooth Contemporary R&B fuck jams. I Shazam'd these two:

Glenn Lewis: "Make Love"
Jazmine Sullivan: "Let It Burn"

"for some reason"

My local Dairy Queen must use an OMD Pandora channel for Muzak, because I dropped in for an Orange Julius and heard both "Sailing On The Seven Seas" and "Pandora's Box" in the 15 or so minutes I was there.

the litany of middle America chain retail outlets you patronize is impressive

Glenn Lewis: "Make Love"
Jazmine Sullivan: "Let It Burn"

Interesting/unfortunate thematic progression there, chronology-wise

i hear "let it burn" on the radio still every so often. it's recent enough that despite not being a hit outside its format i wouldn't call it obscure at all

Chicago: "Alive Again" at Fuddruckers

...

Donald Fagen’s “What a shame about Me” at
Coney Island

That's actually the Dan, from Two Against Nature. That's going Deep!

Sheryl Crow: "Summer Day"* and Spoon: "Can I Sit Next To You" (live) at Jack-In-The-Box.

*Feel like I hear this alot in the wild, a Lenny Kravitz-y flop single from her Soul Music album.

heart, 'nothin' at all' at gourmet fresh

Los Lonely Boys: "Diamonds" at Taco Bell.

“Starlight,” by Taylor Swift, in CVS.

(This track was not one of the seven (7) U.S. singles from Red.)

Robert Forster: "2541" and Elton John: "Grey Seal" at Jack-In-The-Box.

Earlier today in Morrisons: 'Too Much Time' by Captain Beefheart

Little Feat: "Two Trains" and Eric Clapton: "Bad Love" at a pizza place.

The Stampeders: "Sweet City Woman" at Walmart.

is that obscure at this point? sad if so, wonderful single. as with "beach baby" way upthread my brain refuses to accept that anything featured in the sounds of the seventies TV commercial could possibly be obscure twenty-five years later....

Well, I'd say it's fairly obscure. I never heard it much as an Oldie (same goes for "Beach Baby"). It just kind of faded away?

i buy that - pretty much all early 70s light pop bands/songs, however big, have ended up without a radio home for a while now. see also the three dog night thread. CVS and movie soundtracks might be their only hope.

I’ve definitely heard “Sweet City Woman” on the radio in the past decade, and many more times in the decade before that.

I’ve heard it on the radio many times over the last 2-3 years, largely due to discovering a better-than-average oldies station. But I didn’t know the name of the song (or band) until just now.

pretty much all early 70s light pop bands/songs, however big, have ended up without a radio home for a while now

I heard Olivia Newton John's "If You Love Me Let Me Know" in a pizza restaurant yesterday and was thinking about this. Olivia and Anne Murray were huge in their day, yet I don't hear that kind of soft pop much any more.

Anne Murray isn't exactly party music, so why would you play it in a pizza place?

Speaking of inappropriate music, I heard this at Walgreen's. Because when I'm picking up medication for a serious medical condition, I need to hear this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0UXsl_5fdA

i don't have any good hand-wavy social theory explanation as to why, but music that was considered adult contemporary at the time of its release tends to have a poor shot at ending up on classic hits stations decades later, i think. such stations are starting to mine the 90s for material in recent years, and even at-the-time modestly successful alt rock hits seem to be much more likely to get onto the playlists than veritably major successes by, say, celine dion. it's like our cultural memory refuses to allow some of these songs to remain representatives of the era they partly defined. (either that or there's unacknowledged bias among those who program such stations. perhaps both.)

lol. Olivia was sandwiched between "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" and some other Motown hit, which made it stand out even more, but that was also the way pop radio sounded in the mid 70s. xp

totally spitballing here but could these shifts also be demographic in nature? i'm not sure exactly who made up celine dion's buying audience in the 90s, certainly it would have included some teens (especially after titanic obv), but i imagine she was mostly selling to adults, who have maybe now aged out of the big target demographics for whoever is still advertising on radio?

which maybe wasn't quite the case for the easy-listening artists of the 70s, who i think sold plenty of records to silent-majority 25-year-olds (not necessarily hepcat party-goers - - - - let's say young parents), who were still game to hear those songs in dentist's offices in 1995. maybe?

the demographics matter, sure. but i'm talking about even the big adult contemporary smashes that went the full distance in crossover. you didn't get toward the top of top 40 stations' playlists unless you had a sizable fanbase of 20-somethings and even teenagers. this is a very different situation to, say, later-career michael bolton hits, which still saw acceptance at adult contemporary stations but little outside that niche.

like, "my heart will go on" was my brother's favorite song on the radio at the time it was out -- he was 9, and his favorite music was otherwise almost all rock. today you're far more likely, at least in my city, to hear eve 6's "inside out" or harvey danger's "flagpole sitta" on a classic hits station than ANY celine dion song, including "my heart will go on". dion's situation is quite comparable, imo, to that of anne murray and john denver and such.

I was watching this Nat King Cole clipshow on PBS last night, and they showed that he was having high Top 40 songs into the early '60s, which reminded me that you never really those songs, or Sinatra, Dino etc. hits from that era on Oldies radio.

<Really HEARD>

My local oldies station has an all-Sinatra show, broadcast weekly. And I've heard Nat King Cole, Jerry Vale and Roger Whittaker ("The Last Farewell") a few times. And Fabian. And Sly And The Family Stone and Curtis Mayfield and Badfinger. It's a weird station, but I dig it.

In fact, I just wandered over to their site to see what they've played today, and there's Jerry Vale! And Anne Murray!

http://www.albanymagic.com/

Huh, that reminds me of this Oldies station my Aunt used to have on her Warner Cable. A typical six song run would be like "Love Is Blue"-"Jailhouse Rock"-"Call Me" (Chris Montez)-"I Can't Help Myself"-"Soul Finger"-"Daytripper".

there's Jerry Vale! And Anne Murray!

And Bobby Goldsboro! Some oldies get lost to time because they really were terrible.

good post dyl, i buy all that. there's a whole canon of idk, "VH1 Music" that's vanishing from the wild perhaps.

https://i.imgur.com/70GionJ.png

Bonnie Raitt: "Used To Rule The World" at Jack-In-The-Box.

Bee Gees, "You Win Again" at Old Navy.

^^^ I did not know this song, and assumed it was a Hank Williams cover.

A chart-topper in several European countries, but peaked at only #75 in the US... I first heard it thanks to Tom Ewing's "Popular" column at Freakytrigger.

Stone Temple Pilots: "Sin"
The Kings: "This Beat Goes On"
L7: "Pretend We're Dead"

All at Freebirds.

Reminds me that I heard "Cisco Kid" last week st the supermarket.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Wednesday, February 8, 2017 6:10 PM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just heard it again tonight, different supermarket.

I'm not even sure I knew that 'Sunday Morning' was a single, but I honestly don't think I've heard it since the last time I listened to Tragic Kingdom 20+ years ago. Until today, that is.

At CVS, specifically.

I was surprised to hear "I Am Not a Robot" at a coffee shop in Asheville, NC yesterday but that probably doesn't count cause offbeat music is kind of the coffee shop shtick.

I feel like "Sunday Morning" quickly became the consensus "secret best song on the album" pick, among nearly everybody who bought Tragic Kingdom. With diamond-certified sales, it's understandable some of those people became algorithm-programmers for the CVS muzak providers, but I get and share the surprise at 90s alt-rock deep cuts making the cut.

not that obscure, but i still wasn't expecting to hear the sundays' 'here's where the story ends' in a cvs

1:17 PM (five months ago)

I hear that Sundays song in retail situations frequently, always a treat.

― spastic heritage, Sunday, January 20, 2019 7:05 PM (five months ago)

I heard 'Can't Be Sure' at Walmart a few days ago. slightly more unexpected considering that it didn't even chart in the US

xp I worked part-time at a retail clothing chain in the early/mid-2000s, and “Sunday Morning” frequently appeared on the monthly in-store playlist.... I grew to like/appreciate the song a lot.

probably posted this before - I don't shop at basic clothing store Next very often, but when I do, I nearly always hear 'I don't want control of you' by Teenage Fanclub.

Joe Jackson "You Can't Get What You Want" inside a Friday late-night grocery store.