SONG OF THE DAY
“Don’t Look Back In Anger” by Oasis ( (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Creation Records, 1995). Written by Noel Gallagher.
INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)
– The song was written by the band’s guitarist and main songwriter, Noel Gallagher. Noel was so excited of the potential of the song when he first wrote it that he used an acoustic set to perform a work-in-progress version, without the second verse and a few other slight lyrical differences, at an Oasis concert at the Sheffield Arena on 22 April 1995. He said before playing that he’d only written it the previous Tuesday (18 April 1995) and that he didn’t even have a title for it yet.
– The song became the band’s second single (next to “Wonderwall”) to reach #1 in the UK Singles Chart, where it also went platinum.
– Noel said of the song, “[It] reminds me of a cross between “All the Young Dudes” and [something] The Beatles might have done.”
– Noel admits that certain lines from the song are lifted from John Lennon: “I got this tape in the United States that had apparently been burgled from the Dakota Hotel and someone had found these cassettes. Lennon was starting to record his memoirs on tape. He’s going on about ‘trying to start a revolution from me bed, because they said the brains I had went to my head.’ I thought ‘Thank you, I’ll take that’!” “Revolution from me bed” most likely refers to Lennon’s notorious bed-ins in 1969. The piano in the introduction of the song resembles Lennon’s “Imagine”, as well as “Watching the Wheels”. As Oasis are often critisised for borrowing parts of other artists songs for their own, Noel Gallagher commented on the intro’s similarity to Imagine saying “In the case of Don’t Look Back In Anger – I mean, the opening piano riff’s Imagine. 50% of it’s put in there to wind people up, and the other 50% is saying ‘look, this is how songs like Don’t Look Back In Anger come about – because they’re inspired by songs like Imagine’. And no matter what people might think, there will be some 13 year old kid out there who’ll read an interview and think ‘Imagine? I’ve never heard that song’ and he might go and buy the album, you know what I mean?” Gallagher also admits that he was under the influence of illegal substances when he wrote the song and to this day he claims he does not know what it means.
– Noel once admitted, on the Frank Skinner show, to telling Liam that he wanted to sing “Wonderwall”. On hearing “Wonderwall”, Liam demanded that he should sing it. Noel reluctantly agreed on the understanding that he could sing the next song on the album (“Don’t Look Back in Anger”). However, in reality, Noel only ever really wanted to sing “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and used “Wonderwall” as a bargaining tool, since he knew Liam would want to sing it.
– Billboard said of the tune, “Noel Gallagher reveals a deft sense of timing and craft that turn his improprieties into masterful pop gems.”
– Portions of this song appear as a motif in the Chuck episode, Chuck versus the Alma Mater. The song was also in the Episode “Hubris” in the show Cold Case.
MY TAKE
For the first time in about three months, I am actually blogging about a song within 24 hours of hearing it. I have had a long line of lists that I’ve been blogging, and they haven’t been put down onto the interweb in the order they’ve been received. It frustrates me because I wanted this to be a more accurate record of what music was coming in and out of my life, but I haven’t really been able to figure out a way to make it real-time yet. Maybe the blog needs a format change, more weekly list-making, or something like that. You’ll notice that my monthly mixes often have many songs in them that I haven’t blogged about—just going to show that more music is coming into my life than I can do a daily score of, and what I’d like is to have a more accurate reading of all of the intake, rather than just a slow drip out of one song a day at a time.
And….a little bit about the song, how about it? This is very catchy, despite the fact that I sang the chorus lyrics as “Strawberry beret” for about half a day. I only found the song thanks to the fact that (a) it sounds distinctly like Oasis (that is to say, it sounds vaguely like the Beatles) and (b) thanks to 93.9 The River’s amazing website features, I was able to track down exactly what was playing in the hour I drove around doing errands with my mom. Looks like it’s an Oasis week, and, ironically, I referenced this song in my “Wonderwall” post but at the time didn’t know what I was referencing, and was too dumb to take the time to look it up….otherwise, I would have discovered this song DAYS AGO! Let breakthroughs happen on their on due time, their is the important lesson!