How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths

SONG OF THE DAY

“How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths (Meat Is Murder, Rough Trade Records, 1985). Written by Johnny Marr and Morrissey.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

– Written by Smiths singer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr, it was originally a B-side of the 1984 single “William, It Was Really Nothing”.

– “How Soon Is Now?” was subsequently featured on the compilation album Hatful of Hollow.

– Sire Records chief Seymour Stein called it “the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ of the Eighties”, while co-writer Johnny Marr described it as “possibly our most enduring record. It’s most people’s favourite, I think.”

– Despite its prominent place in The Smiths’ repertoire, however, it is not generally considered to be representative of the band’s style.

– Although a club favourite, “How Soon Is Now?” did not chart as well as writers Morrissey and Marr had expected. Most commentators put this down to the fact that the song had been out on vinyl in a number of forms before being released as a single in its own right. The original track runs for nearly seven minutes; however, the 7″ single edit cut the length down to under four minutes. The complete version is generally used on compilations.

– A cover of the song by Love Spit Love was used in the soundtrack for the 1996 film The Craft, and later appeared as the theme song of the television series Charmed for all eight of its seasons. It has since been voted one of the top ten television theme songs of all time.

– Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr wrote “How Soon Is Now?” along with the songs “William, It Was Really Nothing” and “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” during a four-day period in June 1984.

– The song contains only one verse which is repeated twice, plus a chorus and a bridge. The subject is an individual who cannot find a way to break out of his shyness. Two couplets from the song are well known in pop culture, the opening to the verse: “I am the son, and the heir, of a shyness that is criminally vulgar / I am the son and heir, of nothing in particular”, and the chorus: “I am human and I need to be loved / Just like everybody else does”. The opening was adapted from a line in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch: “To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular”. Music journalist Jon Savage commented that the song’s lyrics were evocative of contemporary Manchester gay club culture.

– The tune is built around a guitar chord that rapidly oscillates in volume. As to how the distinctive resonant sound was achieved, Marr gave the following account to Guitar Player magazine in 1990: “The vibrato sound is fucking incredible, and it took a long time. I put down the rhythm track on an Epiphone Casino through a Fender Twin Reverb without vibrato. Then we played the track back through four old Twins, one on each side. We had to keep all the amps vibrating in time to the track and each other, so we had to keep stopping and starting the track, recording it in 10-second bursts… I wish I could remember exactly how we did the slide part — not writing it down is one of the banes of my life! We did it in three passes through a harmonizer, set to some weird interval, like a sixth. There was a different harmonization for each pass. For the line in harmonics, I retuned the guitar so that I could play it all at the 12th fret with natural harmonics. It’s doubled several times.”

– In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine rated the song #486 in its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and #90 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs.
On the Blender magazine website, in their list of The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born, the song was ranked at #72.

– “How Soon Is Now?” was considered a “major problem” to play in concert by the Smiths, and live versions by the Smiths are relatively rare. One live Smiths performance was recorded during the concerts for the live album Rank (1988), but was not used. Instead, a raw version of this song (and entire concert) appeared on the bootleg A Bad Boy from a Good Family, and other versions have appeared on bootleg records such as A Kind of Loving (a rip of a performance in Oxford recorded and broadcast by the BBC).

– Morrissey revived the song in his own concerts as a solo artist, and it has been a live staple on all of his tours since 2004. A live recording was used to open Morrissey’s album Live at Earls Court (2005) and another was to be included on the aborted performance DVD Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

Meat Is Murder is the second studio album by the British alternative rock band The Smiths. It became the band’s sole #1 album in the UK charts during the band’s lifetime, staying on the chart for 13 weeks. It reached #110 in the US.

– In 2003, the album was ranked number 295 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time.

Meat Is Murder was more strident and political than its predecessor, including the pro-vegetarian title track (Morrissey forbade the rest of the group from being photographed eating meat), the light-hearted “Nowhere Fast” and the anti-corporal punishment “The Headmaster Ritual” and “Barbarism Begins at Home”.

– Morrissey also brought a political stance to many of his interviews, courting further controversy. Among his targets were the Thatcher administration, the monarchy, and Band Aid. Morrissey famously quipped of the last, “One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it’s another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England.”

– Musically, the band had grown more adventurous, with Marr adding rockabilly riffs to “Rusholme Ruffians” and Rourke playing a funk bass on “Barbarism Begins at Home”.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Here is the youtube.com video.

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