Single Saturdays: March 25th, 2023

Single Saturdays is Five Cent Sound’s new weekly roundup, where our staff members share a song that they’ve fallen in love with and make their case for why others should give it a listen.

“Cannonball” - the breeders

Lucy Spangler

“Cannonball” by The Breeders is one of my favorite things to come out of the 90s. The band got started when Pixies’ bassist Kim Deal and Throwing Muses’ guitarist Tanya Donelly started making music to let out some repressed creative energy. The genres listed for this band are “Alternative Rock”, “Pop Rock”, “Indie Pop” and “Grunge”.. I think a simpler way to describe the sound of this song is if you took the weird, stripped-down distorted Grunge stylings of Pixies and mixed that with the sound of slightly-edgy Pop Rock bands of the 90’s. At times the sound is sparse, other times loud and in your face. 

“Cannonball” off the 1993 album “Last Splash” was their breakthrough hit. It starts off with distorted humming vocals before cutting to metallic sounding percussion. Next, the iconic bass line and the guitars kick in and bring that upbeat pop rock energy. Deal’s vocals are sweet and soft with more intensity during the chorus; most of the lyrics are repetitive phrases, almost every line gets repeated at least once. It's such a charismatic song and all of these elements mesh together like a sonic collage. 

I chose this song because it lives rent-free on almost all of my playlists, even going back to before I had Spotify or a phone. My dad burned a CD of mine and my brother’s favorite songs that we would play every time we were in the car—this song was on it. It's perfect for car rides, a pick-me-up before a miserable class, or solo dance parties. If “Cannonball” gets you hooked, you should probably listen to the entire “Last Splash” album because the rest of the tracks are just as bizarre and fun. And I think we’re hitting that point in the semester where we desperately need more fun.

“The party” - st. vincent

Selin Tiryakioğlu

I maintain that St. Vincent’s discography is nothing short of musical perfection, and “The Party” is only further proof of that sentiment. The mellifluous ninth track off her sophomore album, Actor, only contains three verses, but the lyricism is embroidered with such nuance and depth that the fleeting words are still privy to multiple interpretations. From the struggles of alcoholism to the deterioration of a relationship, the song is able to simultaneously encapsulate seemingly divorced concepts in each heart wrenching line.

It begins with the lament: “Honey, the party, you went away quickly / But oh, that's the trouble with ticking and talking”. She uses party etiquette of “ticking and talking” interchangeably with its homonym the “ticking and tocking” of a clock in order to mourn the passage of time, which she attributes to the departure of the song’s subject. But is this an ode to a lover, or the party itself? She sings, “I lick the ice cube from your empty glass”, savoring every last drop of alcohol the festivity has to offer. Or perhaps she is grasping at the semblance of a relationship now turned hollow, one which makes her realize that they’ve “stayed much too late / Till they're cleaning the ashtrays”.

She continues in the second verse: “Do you have change or a button or cash? / Oh, my pockets hang out like two surrender flags”. Dripping with desperation, she is dismayed by her lover’s inferred lack of emotional provisions, only to confess that she, too, has nothing more to give. These lines could also be in reference to a literal lack of wealth, a result of spending on alcohol as she would “pay anything to keep [her] conscience clean”. Drowning her romantic afflictions with drink, she drunkenly keeps her “eye on the exit sign, steady now”. The differentiation between an exit of a relationship or of a bar is now inconsequential; she observes the foreboding conclusion of her time at the “party” concurrently with the conclusion of the verse.

The third and final verse serves as a remorseful reflection of her current emotional and physical state. She asks her lover: “How did we get here? / With creaks in these chairs”. She cannot determine when her relationship began to dim, or she is simply too drunk to remember. Neither her nor her lover are the sole perpetrator, as “there aren't enough hands to point all the fingers”. All she can do is stare at “a hole in [her lover’s] tee shirt” and bemoan that she’s “said much too much and they're trying to sweep up”. Unbeknownst to St. Vincent, the party had already begun to fade away. And while repentant, she makes it clear that neither party is to blame.