PEL Presents NEM#242: Marshall Crenshaw Subtracts

You're listening to Nakedly Examined Music, a podcast about songs and songwriters. My name's Mark Lintonmeyer. My guest for episode 242 is Marshall Crenshaw. This singer songwriter burst onto the major label scene with his self titled 1982 album. You're right now hearing Someday, Someway, one of the big singles from that. He was frequently compared to Buddy Holly and, in fact, played Buddy Holly in the 1987 film La Bamba and appeared in the on screen band for the film Peggy Sue Got Married. I should say he's also done some co songwriting work, most notably with the Gin Blossoms, their their song till I hear it from you, giant hit Marshall co wrote. He recorded five total albums on Capitol Records through the eighties and one more album on a different major label and has since been an indie artist. He's He's got 10 albums total, plus some live collections and a presentation of his early demos. His tenth album actually collects together and fixes up, reissues some of his EPs. It's called From the Hell Hole, and we'll be discussing the song Stranger and Stranger, originally released on the 2012 Stranger and Stranger EP, but you can't even find that version anymore. This is the new definitive version, and we'll talk about right on time from his last full album, February Jagged Land. Then look all the way back to Life's Too Short from 1991. That was the album from MCA. Song is a Fantastic Planet of Love. We'll conclude by going back all the way to his second album, Field Day 1983, and listen to the wonderful song, Our Town. Learn more at marshallcrenshaw.com. Learn about this podcast at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com. Support this podcast at patreon.com/ nakedlyexaminedmusic. I will play a little bit of Someday, Someway from your self titled 1982 album. We wanna get pretty quickly to the newest thing from the hell hole 2025. I thought this was the new thing, but I see actually it's, stranger and stranger from the stranger and stranger EP 2013. So there's been a gap there where you've just had some live albums and some reissues. Yeah. Do we wanna give them, like, a a little sense of the shape of your career? You had a bunch of early eighties stuff, and then it petered off a little bit, and you've been playing live very continuously. Right? Yeah. So what's the story with the latest batch? Yeah. I don't know. I've been doing everything continuously over the years. Okay. But I guess there was, like, a six year gap between albums at one point, which was the longest gap. But, anyway, Stranger and Stranger, yeah. It it initially came out in 2012 on an EP. I was doing a series of EPs at the time. The version that's on the new album is a kind of a reworked version of the song, you know, like I did a lot of editing on the recording and just kind of fixed …