Squeezing More Juice From Old Pop Music
By Eric Grigs | September 3, 2022
Recently Spotify shuffled Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” into my daily mix. I hadn’t listened to the classic track in years. But as soon as the lyrics started, I could sing along with every word. Other important brain cells have been lost as I age, but these ones were safe somehow.
Growing up, I was obsessed with that song. The driving rhythm is like a freight train, and the memories it brought back hit me like one. Hearing it again four decades after its release, it still sounded fresh, and I wanted to listen to more from her. So why couldn’t I think of many other songs from this iconic artist who I clearly loved at the time?
Back to Spotify to find out. As much as I love physical media ownership, one of the best things about the streaming era is having complete music catalogs at your fingertips. So the deep-cuts adventure began in earnest and more memories were triggered, including Newton’s hits “Love’s Been a Little Bit Hard On Me” and “Angel of the Morning.” It didn’t take long though to learn, beyond what was served up to me on top 40 radio in the 80s, I didn’t know any of Newton’s non-single, album tracks—which is a shame because this stuff is so good.
I started realizing how my listening habits were so heavily shaped by singles. I’m also pretty sure a big contributor was being a kid with no money of my own when this music was released. Today, for a small monthly subscription fee you can dig into and hear the deepest catalog cuts from almost any artist. Back then you’d have to put cash down on the counter at Sam Goody or Musicland to unlock the potential treasures of an artist you liked—so it felt like a big risk if the rest of the album didn’t live up to the radio singles you had already heard. Much easier to just freely record to cassette tape in my boombox whatever Casey Kasem was playing on Sunday’s countdown. (Even if he did talk over the intro.)
And for the record, I did have a habit of wearing out… well, records. If I liked something, I had a tendency to buy the 45 single instead of the LP and to play it to death. To this day, my sister won’t listen to Laura Branigan because I repeatedly played “Self Control” with self abandonment. Looking back, maybe the first significant expansion of my musical horizons came from the buffet provided by Columbia House where they’d mail you 12 full albums for a penny.
But the flip side of missing out then is actually a gift my younger self has given to adult me today. These amazing tracks from artists I love have just been sitting there waiting all these years for me to catch up with their greatness. How cool is it that I can now discover and listen to what is, in my own world, a new Juice Newton album? For me, it’s like it was just released today, not forty years ago.
Lately, a lot has been said in the media criticizing people’s lack of curiosity about things that were made before the year they were born. I’m not here to lecture anyone on what they choose to spend their time consuming and enjoying. I can certainly understand the feeling of barely being able to keep up with current new releases which feeds the sense of “why go back?”
Instead, this is a recommendation for a particular type of joy I’m getting from these types of cross-time discoveries. It’s mind-bending to think about the sheer amount of what’s out there eluding my detection with each passing year—treasures I don’t know that I love yet, but one day will. It’s just all on me to find them. I wish there was a specific name for this happy feeling, but whatever you call it, it’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to actual time travel.
Or maybe it’s more that we’re all living in our own multiverses. Stuff I don’t know exists, you’ve been jamming to for decades.
Anyway, the Juice Newton discoveries led me down a rabbit hole of finding women musicians who were making the shift from a more 70s singer/songwriter sound to more polished synth pop productions in the early 80s. I loved hearing “Dirty Looks” and “Can’t Wait All Night” for the very first time, marveling at a country queen’s crossover into rock. She passed the baton from Barbara Mandrell and Dolly Parton before her to Shania Twain after, all the way up to Taylor Swift. It was an important jump in Quantum Leaping through pop country generations.
Digging further, I asked myself what music did Kim Carnes release after “Bette Davis Eyes”? Answer: Albums Voyeur and Café Racers had songs that got some minor airplay (title track “Voyeur” was nominated for a Grammy!), but for some reason, never showed up on my personal radar at the time. Which now means “You Make My Heart Beat Faster” and her cover of the theme from the movie Looker (a favorite film of mine) are both destined for the top of my “most-listened to” Spotify Wrapped list come this December.
Next up: what did Melissa Manchester do to follow up the smash single “You Should Hear How She Talks About You”? Her two subsequent albums didn’t garner as much attention, but in hindsight, they feel even more classic to me. If you love synth pop, I highly recommend “City Nights” and “No One Can Love You More Than Me” from Emergency, as well as “All Tied Up” and “Energy” from Mathematics. Other people must be taking notice, since this under-appreciated LP recently got the deluxe remastered treatment with a few bonus tracks and remixes. Reissued from Real Gone Music, Mathematics was her only album on the MCA label after a decade at Arista, and it leaned even harder into a new wave dance sound.
You may have already heard the music I’ve mentioned, and many of them were released as singles but are largely forgotten because they just didn’t hit big—or worse, even chart. But now they’ve got a special place among my personal new discoveries. If you’re like me, constantly curating dozens of playlists on Spotify, hopefully this sparks some ideas for looking into your own musical blind spots. Happy digging up what you’ve missed from artists you already know and love!
And if you do go back in time, tell me, what great new old stuff did you find?
Eric Grigs is a pop culture writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.