Day 80: A song you like with Monday in the title.

“Maybe Monday” – ‘Til Tuesday

Most people know one song from ‘Til Tuesday—”Voices Carry.” Most people (at least of my generation) know who Aimee Mann is, maybe not by name, but because she starred in the video for “Voices Carry” and that hair is hard to forget.

Despite the hit song and the hair, ‘Til Tuesday never got the attention they deserved, and that’s a shame, because they were a very good band.

It’s hard for me to gauge the actual reaction to their debut album, also called Voices Carry and also good, because ‘Til Tuesday was a Boston band, and, as you might expect, Boston bands got a lot of play on Boston radio. So I heard ‘Til Tuesday all the time when the album came out. Not only “Voices Carry,” but “Love In A Vacuum” and “Looking Over My Shoulder” (a personal favorite) as well. So to me, it seems like ‘Til Tuesday should have been more popular than they ended up being. But this apparently wasn’t the case in other areas.

So, as I mentioned, Voices Carry was a good album. Not as good as some of the band’s later work, but I like it a lot more than most of Aimee Mann’s solo material. (Um, Aimee, there are other speeds besides mid-tempo, somber ballads. You remember that, right?) It was classed as “New Wave” but to me it never truly fell in to that group. There were always hints of something much broader than the mid-80s New Wave genre there. And, that hint came to fruition as Aimee Mann’s songwriting skills matured.

At any rate, “Maybe Monday” was another song on that album (and there was a song called “On Sunday” on the follow-up Welcome Home; seems they had a thing for days of the week). It was never destined for stardom. It was definitely an “album track.” But I like it just the same. There’s something vulnerable in the lyric which describes someone desperately waiting for the phone call from the person they like; a call that will never come. (This was something I could relate to in the mid-80s, when my luck with girls was, well, none.)

As the band’s work moved farther and farther away from New Wave (while the band simultaneously moved farther and farther from being an actual band and more toward a solo project) the interest from the record company waned. To the point where they barely acknowledged the third album Everything’s Different Now. (Another shame, because it’s probably the best of the bunch, despite having no songs with days of the week in the titles.)

After that, Aimee went solo, fought with record companies (yes, plural), toned down her hair, and married Michael Penn (whose “No Myth” is the only song most people know of his; the two-hit wonder couple).

She’s continued to write and record, with lots of critical success (and, as mentioned, many mid-tempo songs), but nothing approaching the commercial success of “Voices Carry.”

My advice: bring back the hair and the days of the week, that’s the key. Oh, and crank the metronome beyond 70…