Violent Femmes - Self Titled (w/ guests Wendy Rollins and Paul Nance)

The Great Albums

Bill Lambusta

Music, Music Commentary

4.3 • 760 Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2016

⏱️ 129 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brian and Bill welcome DJ Wendy Rollins (radio1045.com) and musician Paul Nance (theloudcompany1.bandcamp.com) from the Alter Natives podcast to help us discuss the Violent Femmes' self titled debut album (1983, Slash). Working as an acoustic trio, the band was discovered while busking outside a Pretenders concert. After playing a short set at that show, the band began work on this album, mostly written while primary singer/songwriter Gordon Gano was still in high school. Wendy and Paul share their experiences discovering the band in college (Wendy) and, surprisingly, at an earlier age (Paul) and how it helped shape their lives. Bill, Brian, Paul, and Wendy discuss receiving their copy of this album at college freshman orientation, the band's success in their later years, their dorky image and id-driven rock, the inter-band conflict over selling a song to Wendy's Old Fashioned Burgers, what genre the Femmes fit in and their timeless sound, songs with involuntary physical reactions, Brian and Wikipedia being in agreement, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, any perceived misogyny or sexism on the album, the music literally saving Wendy's life, Beatle-esque harmonies, Jeb!, xylophone vs. marimba, what the heck a tranceaphone is, and the ubiquitous track by track review!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. Bill here. Just a quick message. I wanted to let you guys know that this episode,
0:06.2	although it was a great episode, we had a slight technical snafu. We ended up using a setup that
0:12.5	we weren't used to using because we had two guests with us instead of our usual one.
0:17.8	And because of that, my microphone ended up coming in a little hotter than usual.
0:23.4	Hopefully it doesn't bother you guys because this was a wonderful episode. We had a great
0:28.6	conversation with Wendy and Paul. And hopefully you guys will enjoy it as much as we did. Thanks and on to the show. When I'm out walking, I struck my stuff, and I'm so strong out.
0:58.7	I'm high as a kite.
1:00.5	I just might stop to check you out.
1:03.5	Let me go on.
1:06.6	Like I glist.
1:06.9	Hello, and welcome to the great albums podcast.
1:09.5	I'm Bill.
1:09.9	And I'm Brian.
1:13.3	And today, what were we just listening to right there, Brian?
1:18.5	That was the Violin Femmes, their 1983 debut album. That song was Blister in the Sun.
1:21.5	And that's what we're going to be talking about that whole album today.
1:28.3	Yeah, no, this is going to be a good one. I'm looking forward to it. So if you've never listened to the podcast before, what we do here every week is we take a different album of music and just talk about what makes it great.
1:31.9	We're going to talk about our kind of personal relationship with the music and we're going
1:37.2	to talk a little bit about the history of the band and the production and then we're going
1:41.2	to get into a track-by-track review.
1:43.3	Sounds good. Sign me up. Let's do it. We're not going to do it alone, Brian.
1:48.2	Really? So that's what those two doors are that you've put in the room here?
	...

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