Forgotten Music #27: Michael Penn - No Myth (1989)

A few songs are simply lightning in a bottle. They are released, they are seemingly inescapable for a few months, then they disappear. M's "Pop Musik" comes to mind. And so does this track.

I was standing in line waiting for a prescription to be filled and heard the opening guitar riff come over the grocery store PA system. I thought... "I know this song". And then it hits you. A song so familiar to you it's impossible to forget, it sat stirring about in your subconscious for years and years, waiting for a time when you heard it again to get you singing along with the lyrics. And you wonder how you could have forgotten what this song sounded like.

Michael Penn is the brother of actors Sean and Christopher Penn. He recorded with a band called Doll Congress before releasing his debut solo album, March, in 1989. It was an immediate critical success and the song "No Myth" rose into the Top 20 in the US, Canada and in Australia. One couldn't go anywhere in 1989 and 1990 without hearing this song. He also won the Best New Artist at the MTV Music Awards in 1990. The album was his only commercial success though, and the song his only Top 40 hit.

He released albums up until 2005. He's also found fame as a film score composer (he did the score for Boogie Nights), and as a producer (producing the Wallflowers and Aimee Mann) amongst others. His work also appeared on the soundtrack for Lena Dunham's project, Girls. He married Aimee Mann in 1997. He continues as a score composer to this day.

"No Myth" was from Michael Penn's 1989 debut March.

Forgotten Music #18: Minutes from Downtown - "Heaven Street" (1983)

Minutes from Downtown are a Canadian one-hit wonder that aren't very well known even for their one hit, "Heaven Street". Admittedly, I hadn't even heard of them until running into them on a compilation called Pure Canadian Retro 80s, and I pretty much champion every obscure Canadian band from the 80s there is. "Heaven Street" captivated me from the first time I heard it a few years ago, and I scoured around to find more information about the band, but not finding much about them on the web. Reaching out to my fellow Canadian new wave fans, my friend Gary Flanagan said he had found a place in the States that had a LP pressing of their one and only album, and he payed a pretty penny to get it. The original LP was out of print and I was unlikely to find it in any of my many digs through dusty record bins that I so love digging through.

Last year, during my bi-monthly search through pawn shops and second hand stores in Vancouver, I found it. But, I found a CD repressing of the album, that was pupulisted by Popguru Records back in 2009. I had no idea it had been released on CD and neither did Gary. Even better, it was still sealed in plastic. The second-hand store had no idea what they had, and doubtful too did the person who originally owned it know what it was. I bought it for $2.

To be honest, the full album is no great shakes. It's pretty standard 80s pop fare. "Heaven Street", however, is on a very different level. It's one of those rare pieces that perfectly captures the sound of the day in shimmering brilliance. It deserves to be celebrated with the best pop songs of the 80s, alongside Split Enz "I Got You", The Hoodoo Gurus' "I Want You Back" or ABC's "The Look of Love".

The compilation I originally heard it on is also pretty interesting. There's a lot of tunes you'd expect to see on a Canadian 80s comp (Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance", Martha and the Muffins' "Echo Beach", Glass Tiger's "Don't Forget Me When I'm Gone"), but there's a lot of more obscure acts that deserve their own post in Forgotten Music some day (The Jitters, Strange Advance, Bamboo, National Velvet, The Deserters)