Just because two songs have the same name, it doesn’t mean they’re the same song. In theory, there’s an unlimited number of song titles; in practice, there are a lot of repeats. We’ll be looking at some examples of those as well as we proceed, starting with today’s example. Here’s The Kinks with a lesser known tune from their songbook:
I love the old-timey sound here, with the brass instruments and the clarinet. With the subject matter of “demon alcohol”, you could imagine it being performed – non-ironically, of course – at a dive in New Orleans.
Now for a very different and much better known song of the same name, from the Barenaked Ladies:
Two things are true: One, “Stunt” was a really good disc, with multiple radio-friendly cuts on it. Two, I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of those radio-friendly cuts on any radio station I’ve ever listened to in Houston, not even the reasonably broad-based KACC. I admit, I don’t listen to Top Hits or Alternative stations, which is where I expect BNL’s songs lived in the 90s. But it’s a mystery to me why none of them have begun turning up on Classic Rock stations, given that they’re now, you know, music from two decades ago. As we know, though, there’s no such thing as “Classic Rock” after 1989, so wherever these songs live on the radio now, they’re still not on the radio stations (okay, station) where I think they ought to be.