Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - The Yellow Album With Alex Navarro

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Just as we did for The Simpsons Sing The Blues, we're joined by Alex Navarro from Nextlander to discuss the other novelty album from Springfield. Yes, it's time for us to cover the barely-released oddity The Yellow Album! And we're chatting about it just when it was planned to be released, between the fourth and fifth seasons. But why was it released in 1998? How was there a lost Prince song on it? Who worked on it and who held it back for six years? After a lot of research, we have answers to all that, and then we review all the songs in one epic podcast full of love and commandments!  Support this podcast, hear it ad-free, and get 180+ bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

You have worked so hard to make your business into a reality, but achieving your next business goal, that can be overwhelming. What if you had someone to talk through the options and the next steps with? Someone who wants to see your business succeed while giving you peace of mind. That's why the bankers at Merchants Bank are here, ready with exceptional service every step of the way. Let's dream together. Visit merchantsbank.com to get started.

Merchants Bank is a proud member of FDIC. This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Head there to check out exclusive podcasts like Talking Futurama, Talking of the Hill, the What a Cartoon Movie podcast, and tons more. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, where thou shalt have fun. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Funkenstein's monster, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always? My name is Henry, and I am Funky. Henry Gilbert, that is.

And who is our special guest on the line? This is Alex Navarro from Nextlander, and these podcasters are doing it for themselves. And regrettably, this week's episode is all about The Yellow Album. This is Alex Navarro from Nextlander, and these podcasters are doing it for themselves. And regrettably, this week's episode is all about the Yellow Album. Hey, those are my thoughts about this album, which came out on November 24th, 1998. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history happy thanksgiving 1998 bobby a bug's life defeats rugrats at the box office pretty fly for a white guy is the biggest song on the radio and a couple of small games are released that being legend of zelda ocarina of time and half-life wow imagine getting

this instead of those world-changing video games yeah i heard you like the simpsons these could have been sitting next to each other on the new releases shelf that is sam goody the ocarina of time i mean i played the hell out of that i didn't play half-life until a later console release because i was a console loser but I included that too because Alex you know weren't you in the press yet when those came out or were you playing those as a civilian? I was totally playing those as a civilian though I knew people who worked in games press at that time my former boss Jeff Gerstmann he was actually reviewing Ocarina of Time during that summer I remember it I would go over to his house and be like I can't do anything

I am playing Ocarina of Time right now. So that was a fun novel, but no, I was purely a civilian back then. 98, still widely considered one of the greatest years ever for video games, a wild time for pop culture, and then this thing happens. These things were elevating

culture, but then the old album said, let's bring it down a little bit. It's getting too far. Yeah. ocarina time like that was when it was like first shown off in like 95 at space jam or maybe 96 this is sorry too gamery but did you say space jam henry did say space jam i meant space world yes space jam is fictional there was never a space jam event no but when Ocarina came out, I told my family, like, don't talk to me for the entire Thanksgiving. I'm playing this.

Leave me alone. That was my antisocial stance that Thanksgiving. Pretty Fly for a White Guy, that's Offspring's biggest hit, right? Oh, by a wide margin, I'd have to imagine.

It's sort of like they wrote a Weird Al song without Weird Al. And then Weird Al did it. Yeah, yeah. What is the Weird Al parody of that song? I don't think I've ever actually heard it. Oh, Pretty Fly for a Rabbi.

He reverse engineered the parody song. Oh, I should have known that's where he would go, but nonetheless, I'm just shaking my head in approval. Okay. Yeah, A Bug's Life, we talked all about that on an entire podcast last summer. Yeah, we have a very long commentary on that movie with a full history at

patreon.com slash talking Simpsons at the $10 level it is I would not say underrated but it's better than you remember and it is you know not the greatest Pixar movie but it's beats other things

like the good dinosaur and those lesser ones so you know worth revisiting and as always they fully very funny in any role it's got to be better than the ant bully right out of all the bug movies I haven't

seen that one okay it's not good you don't have to but if you want to you could watch it i guess and i think it's held up better than rugrats oh also to put this in time for simpsons fans the week this came out the episode that aired is lisa gets an a which is so far removed from how this album feels and also it aired the same night as one of my all-time favorite episodes of X-Files, Triangle, the one shot per act episode where they're trapped in the Bermuda Triangle. Oh, that's a great one. I haven't seen that. So it's shot like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope?

Yes, yeah. Wow. But only per, you know, act or commercial break came, and then they start with a new shot. So they start with Duch new shot so they start with dukovny maldrin scully are separated and my favorite one i remember when i first saw it because i was starting to learn how television and movies are made is that in the long one with scully she goes into an elevator on one floor you stay in the elevator and she comes out on

the other floor i was like wow that how'd they do that they were trying for some stuff around that time. I feel like that was right before X-Files really started falling down a path of like, we don't really know what we're doing here. They were at least striving for some interesting things back then. So that's what happened

as we were all getting ready for our turkey and gravy when this album came out in 1998. And joining us once again is Alex Navarro from Nextlander. Alex last joined us for season three's Lisa the Greek, although he joined us back in 2020 for our very long look at The Simpsons Sing the Blues. Welcome back to the show, Alex. Thank you, and we're sorry.

Thank you so much for having me back. You know, when you said we were going to do this, I was like, well, Simpsons Sing the Blues, not an album that has really held up very well, but it'll be fun to talk about and what have you. I was really convinced I had never heard this before when you brought it up. And then I booted it up and I heard love and I was like, some sense memory in me was triggered in a way that had lain dormant for God only knows how long.

I don't know still to this day how I heard it. I don't know why I know this song at all, but it was like a bad thing came flooding back to me. And then I listened to the rest of the album and I'm like, I've never know why I know this song at all, but it was like a bad thing came flooding back to me. And then I listened to the rest of the album and I'm like, I've never heard the rest of this. So somehow I only heard the first song and none of the rest of this album. You know, you tried to prepare me for how wretched this thing is. I was still kind of shocked. Yeah, I feel like an irresponsible Simpsons podcaster. We're in our 10th year of doing this podcast and only yesterday did I hear this album for the entire running length for the first time. And I think previously I had just popped on a few

songs wondering, what is the deal with this? And I immediately backed out upon hearing what the character voices sound like. We'll get into that, but it's also wrong. It's 46 minutes of punishment. There is no respite anywhere in there or something that's even like marginally okay it's just brutal if you allow yourself the ability to hit skip then you will skip so many tracks in this and only if you are a dedicated podcaster would you listen to any of these tracks yeah i think with the second you hear love like once you get to the first chorus and now you're like well i know how this is gonna go skip then you get to the next song you can skip 30 seconds in pretty much all the songs because they're all exactly the same this album is so bad that people only listen to it if it's their job yes but it's such a strange

strange oddity and i have a whole history to share with you guys but yeah i mean i did not pick this up when i saw it on the CD shelf back in 1998. I have my copy right here that I bought some years ago because I had a feeling we'd eventually be doing this on a podcast. When I saw this on store shelves, I thought, oh, is this a sequel to Songs in the Key of Springfield, which I believe was the first compilation of the music from the show? And I picked it up and I thought, oh, these are original songs. I'm too old for this, but I'm not too old to listen to all my favorite songs from the show and I picked it up and I thought oh these are original songs I'm too old for this but I'm not too old to listen to all my favorite songs from the show it was so strange when it

came out it was at such a weird time for Simpsons and then if you look at it if you listen to it it is so set to a time that is so confusing of like why is this like this in 1998 if you bothered to pull it up and then on top of it like the reviews if you bothered to pull it up?

And then on top of it, like the reviews, if you bothered to like look for reviews of it, reviews weren't nice at all, nor should they have been. They were deserving of bad reviews. Yeah. I mean, the thing that's really jarring about it, like Simpsons saying the blues felt old when it came out, but that was very intentional. Like they were going for this sort of like dad presentation of music and then, you know, making it sort of the Simpsons version of edgy or whatever it was back then but here it's like they're trying to capture something that feels

like musical zeitgeist but it's the musical zeitgeist from like seven years beforehand and even some of the stuff they're covering is even older than that like the most recent song they cover on here is a eurythmic song and that was old even probably around the time they were making this yeah it was like a seven-year-old hit everything in it feels old it feels old for its time feels like such a whiff it almost feels like they had to release it by my guess before i did research was that it was like was it just they spent so much money on this they thought we just gotta release it at some point like a sunk cost thing yeah? Yeah. Yeah. You're right, Alex. Like the original album, Sings the Blues,

was meant to be old or sound old. Outside of the few covers on this, this album is 1993.mp3. It sounds so much like that year. If you were alive for the 90s, 93 and 98 are such different soundscapes in terms of what's popular, what music sounds like.

And the second I turned on the first track, I thought this is not 1998. This sounds like a relic compared to when it actually came out. Because the 90s are such a weird decade for music in particular, because the first two years of the 90s are basically the 80s hangover. Alternative rock really starts blowing up in like 91, 92. That kind of shapes things for a number of years after that. And by the time we get to 98, things have already changed again.

Like what's big at this time? It's like Metallica is getting into their dad rock phase. You know, like new metal is coming up. Boy band craze is about to start really blowing up big time. So like the stuff that they're making here felt more like 1991 than anything else in 1993 or 94 94 whenever they were recording this and by the time 98 came around they were already two steps removed from what was pop culture relevant bart is barely talking about like he is behind the eight ball to nirvana on

this album at a time when as we were talking about offspring is one of the biggest bands in america and the offspring has already reshaped themselves from being a fairly alternative-friendly punk band into this radio rock thing that they now are. To think this came out in the early days of Total Request Live, that is a very different music industry. Yeah, totally. For me, too, when I think if I actually bothered to pick this up in 98 when it came out, I think of my ages. I was eight when my family got Simpsons Sing the Blues in the Christmas season of 1990. And I was 16 when this album came out. You are so different between the ages of eight and 16. Yeah, that's a universal. Doesn't matter what your tastes are. You have shifted somehow by that point. And it is demonstrably like a worse novelty album than Sings the Blues, too. Sings the Blues at least has some fun.

I feel like this lacks the Michael Jackson songwriting that at least makes an okay novelty single. Yeah. I mean, the biggest problem we'll get into at some point, major production issues that are glaringly obvious. But also another glaring issue with the album is that it seems like not as many people were playing ball there are too many bart songs harry sheer gets one verse on one song and he probably hated doing that and i think julie is on one song outside of doing some patty and selma back up on another so it just feels like do you like hearing bart and lisa well that's mainly what this album is.

Yes. They really should have included more songs like the one song with Apu on here. Like, just expand it to everybody else. I feel like if Harry Shearer was playing ball back then, there would have been a Flanders song, a Skinner song, or maybe Look at All Those Idiots Part 2. How did such a misbegotten thing come to be before we go through track by track? I'm dying to know. It is an amazing story that I did a bit of research on, but to set the stage for why this happened, you do need to remember that Simpsons Sing the Blues was a giant hit. It was certified platinum, over 2 million copies shipped, and that was in 1990 not only that but do the bar man was a number one uk single like huge in the uk and also it was britain's seventh best-selling song of 1991

was do the bar man insane to say setting the stage for crazy frog god yeah they do have more appetite for novelty songs on the charts than we do though then again i mean i mentioned it before pretty fly for white guy is a novelty song absolutely yeah yeah but also even by this time in europe like the music they're listening to is just like an endless thrum of euro techno there's nothing on this album that would appeal to the euro mind by this stage they're all like you said they're neck deep in crazy frog and aqua and then deep deep trouble also comes out as the second single not in the u.s the music video march 91 i think have a longer tail than they expected and this was also at a time where kids albums with a little edge to them were selling very good like this also is right after the the Turtles movie album and coming out of our shelves.

Not long after the Deep, Deep Trouble music video, then they launched the Secret of the Ooze soundtrack, leading with a Vanilla Ice original. Ah, yes, the Ninja Rap. And also by February 1992, Dinosaurs Biggs Songs comes out, which also I think did all right, but not platinum. I don't think i'm the baby gotta love me hit the radio though at least not in my neighborhood no i i don't think so either so you can see why geffen the music publishing company that did the the record label of the first album

wanted to do a sequel i do feel like if they were really on top of things they would have got that sequel going in 91 instead of the movement starts in 92 which that is a very long time when you're talking about a novelty fad album about the Simpsons during Bartmania it's also kind of like where the Simpsons is even a year later because a year later the novelty of the Simpsons has maybe worn off slightly it is not the Bartman fever that it once was but it's you know the show's still insanely popular it's just a different show the tone of it is different and so like the approach on this feels very early Simpsons versus where the show kind of went after that the way they chose to promote it once the decision was made to start it and the recording began it was during the summer break between two and three, sorry, the summer break between three and four as they're still working on four. I believe it was summer in 92 based on

stuff I found out later, but the earliest, like one of the earliest articles I could find on it promoting it was October 92, which is where it is said, quote, Prince, Linda Ronstadt and C&C Music Factory will be heard jamming with The Simpsons on the Yellow Album, the second disc from Fox TV's famed animated family. The word from The Simpsons' meister Matt Groening is their recording is finished and it will be out in February, along with accompanying new videos so crazy they were already saying this is going to be a february album and they're going to pay for music videos for like the movement was there like though you got to get this out at christmas a february release

for a kid's novelty album like that's a mistake and this was around the time too that they were trying to think of the movie at least james l. Brooks wanted to make Camp Krusty into the movie, and they had to talk him down from that. But it seemed like they were ready for wave two of Simpsons Mania before they thought it would inevitably end by season five or six. In that same news article, they do ask Matt Grady, like, so will there be a Simpsons movie? And he's like, well, maybe, we'll see.

It would take another 15 years, but it had happened. Then there's a December 1992 article that also i could find with graining bragging again that he's gonna have prince singing back up for bart on my name is bart and they call it the yellow album like that's all promoted the same article also adds george clinton to the list of people who have been confirmed for it. They are promoting this, and they are still teasing a February release. To put this even more into time perspective, it's promoted again in an issue of Spin Magazine for the January 1993

that has arrested development on the cover, the hip-hop group, not the TV show. The cast of the TV show. Yeah, you know, it feels so misleading because it's called The Yellow Album, but that's a joke that writes itself. And the cover art is great. It is Bill Morrison drawing of Sergeant Pepper with all the Simpsons characters.

But then the actual content of the album is nothing like the two jokes it leads with. It just feels like a bait and switch. Like, what is this, like Simpsons covering the Beatles? No, not at all. Not in close. No. And then there was one more I could find in March, late March 93. They're still talking about it in Entertainment Weekly.

And they even named that Homer is going to sing Funny How Time Slips Away with Linda Ronstadt. So they have this information. But that's like the last piece I could find on it. The trail goes cold in 93. And that's where there must have been a decision to not do it. And the only other journalism I could find before doing my own was in the very useful to our previous podcast, Oral History of Simpsons Sing the Blues, the executive producer John Boyland, who also was the EP on this, said,

There was talk of a sequel, but the scheduling was stupidly hard to do we kept trying but we just couldn't get it done the show had exploded it was so big and everyone was so busy the main issue after that was just scheduling which i say total bullshit they scheduled everything and recorded it it was done it was not scheduling like that's that's boiling in 2015 trying to make an excuse for why a crappy album was barely released. So they had scheduled this. They had obviously recorded a decent amount of it. OK, so there's two artists here that get mentioned that are not on the album that I'm curious about.

You mentioned C&C Music Factory. Are they on the album at all? Technically, yes. But as producers of two of the songs, basically there's two major producers that were cnc music factory right one is the songwriter and producer on love and the other is the songwriter producer on i have it written down it's the actual factory yes yeah david cole was the one on that so they did get cnc music factory technically though that should also be noted on this album you'd have to read the liner notes to know that stars worked on this because they are not promoted

on the album which also seems entirely contractually based too linda ronstadt's people are out there being like yeah let's not really put your name front and center on this thing if at all possible i think around this time she did her duet with kermit so she was getting around yeah no how do you not put on the back of your album like featuring these famous musicians who sure by 1998 were not as big as they were but still how do you not put it there including one member of cnc music factory was dead by the time this album released right so the other one was prince obviously the front and center name that was sort of brought up in

the original promotional materials who as far as we can tell does not appear anywhere on this album is there a reason for that yes so i have all these answers so i first went to our wonderful simpsons legends we've interviewed before, Jay Kogan, Jeff Martin, and John Vitti, who John Vitti does not have a credit on the album, but he was also in there, but he was also in the office then. Jay Kogan has a writing credit on the Cramp Krusty song, and Jeff Martin has a writing credit on 24 Hours a Day. Jeff Kogan had no memory of this and was just like, I can't help you. I don't remember this at all jeff martin he also barely remembered it but this was his on the record response the writers didn't think simpsons sing the blues was any kind of triumph though there wasn't much enthusiasm for

the yellow album i wrote a version of 24 hours a day heard the guy producing the album had changed it around a lot which didn't bother me and then the album didn't come out until years later honestly i've never listened to it okay and john vd as well he did not remember it he didn't work on it it was above his pay grade i think was his feeling his one guess was it maybe it was mac reigning exercising some level of quality control of keeping it from releasing for so long and then eventually just giving up on it that was his guess from being around at the time then i got a huge breakthrough from going through the liner notes and seeing okay who produced what and i found that a record producer who is online and uses twitter by the name of greg haver was the producer and co-writer of the Ten Commandments of Bart.

And I want to say a giant thank you to Greg Haver, who gave me an hour of his time for a chat. And he even shared with me some cool pictures from his time working on it. He had so many answers on this that really illuminated things. Thank you, Greg. Fantastic. It's Greg Haver. Follow him on Twitter, Greg H-A-V-E-R. And he is a Welsh musician. His band Waterfront charted in the U.S. in the 80s with the song Cry. And he then transitioned into being a drummer and producer for artists like Manic Street Preachers and Corey Hart. Oh, wow. Spice's solo album after the Spice Girls broke up. So Haver says that he was starting out his producer career early on working in the UK and that EMI Music Publishing, the UK publishing arm of Simpsons Sings the Blues, was looking for help with this new album because it sold so well overseas, especially in the UK. They wanted a UK perspective on it. And Haver said when he saw the list of songs he could make a demo for,

he saw one of them was written by Mac Grading, and he thinks, well, that one's definitely not getting cut, so I should try to make a demo for that one. Sensible. So he made a demo. He thinks he had the edge because he did a full demo for the six-minute song instead of like 30 seconds or a minute and they hired him and so he was working under John Boylan though his track is

the only one where Boylan is not credited as a producer so that was also why I wanted to ask Haver because it sounded like it was more of a Matt Groening operation done outside of the John Boylan arm of things Haver then flies to Los Angeles. He records with Nancy Cartwright mainly, but also Dan and Yardley Smith are both on the track as well, so he worked with them. And he actually has a drawing by Matt Groening signed on the date they did it, so he knew it was September 16, 1992,

when they recorded the track. And he also had a fun picture, a Polaroid of him him with Nancy Cartwright on that day that he had saved, too. It was really nice. And so he worked on it, recorded it. And I have some stories about that when we'll talk about that track. But he also did hear murmurings that there could be a music video. But he's like, way above my pay grade. But he was sure, spring 93, he was like, oh,, that was the planderly side heard too, spring 93.

But then he goes back to Wales and produces the rest of his track and sends it in. And then his belief, what he thinks he had heard, was a disagreement between 20th Century Fox's music division and Geffen because it sounded like Fox wanted more control over the album and thus more money when it came out and he thinks it was a big disagreement between Geffen and Fox over it and then maybe by that point they're like oh well the iron's not hot anymore anyway so forget it forget it and so it just gets put in the vaults for a while and he did say he also thinks it

probably was complicated that they had to renew their permissions from certain artists who were in this and as well he said he was very frustrated at young in his career because he's like no i thought i was going to have a giant hit i was going to be on the next do the bart man and they never release it i'm going to be on the next do the bart man is just a really tragic thing to say about your career. I'm sorry. It just is. Well, not quoting him literally there.

Yeah, I know. I'm just saying it's, I know it was a huge hit over in Europe. It's just one of those things of just like perspective has probably changed that view over time. Oh yeah. Now he looks back on it as a funny story to tell. Yeah.

Yeah. And he did say that he was asked to help with some of the remixing of it in 97, but then he himself was shocked that it just appeared on shelves in 98 he did not know when it got released and it got released huh he also had a funny story that later now lives in auckland new zealand and he was on a panel with brett mckenzie talking about you know being being musicians and they've shared memories of like, oh, you know, Brett, you were on the Simpsons. I did a Simpsons song too. And it was a fun story he gets to share.

So there's his perspective on it. Now I did learn two more things that I think also explain why it got dumped out. One, Bobby mentioned songs in the key of Springfield. Now that didn't sell crazy. And it was a Rhino Records release, which is like a boutique niche thing, but it did sell really good. So I think that maybe inspired them to think that they could release another album and it could actually sell. And offhand, that was what, 96, 97? That was 97. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And again, that one was a collection of songs just from the show, right? Yes. Yeah. And the right move to do, do not original songs remind people of the good songs they like and then i found one more piece to the puzzle of why they would have specifically picked

this day they wanted to ride some coattails at the record shops because the same day released was south park's chef aid i just found that out in my research too, Henry. No big coincidence there. And it just shows how much animated sitcoms have changed since the original production of the Yellow Album, in which South Park exists in its third season probably and now has an entire soundtrack album. Yes. Well, you know what? Chef Aid, if I recall, it's definitely better than this album. Chef Aid is way better than this.

Just by having a new rancid song called brad logan on it which i really like and also it's got matt and trey actually did like a funny joke song where they were forced to have on this euro song called horny but then they just talk over it the whole time and about how much they hate it now i am certain they put it out specifically on that day they imagined kids going into the record shop to get south park chef aid and they're like oh a new simpsons album too well why not buy both that makes sense but it also feels like kind of a staggering miscalculation because at that stage the kids that were watching south park were definitely not the kids the kids that were watching the simpsons at this point the simpsons audience was probably skewing a little older. Yeah, they didn't want to hear a jam session with Lisa and P-Funk. Yeah.

They wanted to hear Kyle's mom is a bitch. Totally. And that was on that album. And as far as covers go, they wanted to hear Cartman singing Come Sail Away, not Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves. You know, I never bought Chef Aid. I was a big South Park fan at the time. I don't know why I didn't buy this. I think it's because it wasn't just all comedy songs and that turned me off.

This album is 76 minutes long. I didn't know CDs could go that long. It's about at the limit, I think, right? Yeah, it is. That is the upper limit, I think, of CD technology. 22 songs. 22. 22.

The Simpsons will be right back. Hello there, children. Kyle, Stan, Cartman, Kenny, and Chef join today's biggest superstars for one of the most memorable moments in musical history. Chef Aid, the South Park album, featuring Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne, Rancid, and special performances from Chef, Cartman, Master P, and much, much more. Available on CD or cassette. In stores November 24th. Oh my God! Ozzy Osbourne bit Kenny's head off! When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops.

So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Hey everybody, it's Henry Gilbert and one of the 10 commandments of this podcast is you must keep listening.

And a big thank you to our guest this week, Alex Navarro from Nexlander. We always love having Alex on. It's been too long, and he had so many fun insights into this not very good album. And thank you so much, Alex, for your time. Everybody should be checking out. I'm sure you do. All the cool stuff they are doing in Nexlander, all the game coverage, all the podcasts, all the streams. They're doing so much cool stuff on Nexlander with tons of exclusives on their patreon thank you again

alex we'd love to have you back and the same big thank you goes to our wonderful patrons at patreon.com slash talking simpsons supporters there get ad free podcasts and a week early if you sign up there for five bucks a month not only those ad-free podcasts but also two new episodes a month of talking futurama and talking the hill where we cover one episode of each of those shows super in-depth just like we do a simpsons album and we have so many in our back catalog almost 200 i believe of us covering all the previous episodes of futurama all the previous episodes of king of the hill and all the episodes of The Critic, all the episodes of Mission Hill, and many of our favorite episodes of Batman, the animated series.

Sign up today to see all the stuff you're missing out on at patreon.com slash talking simpsons. But if you want something even nicer than a duet with Linda Ronstadt, then you need to sign up at the premium level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons the folks who go up to 10 bucks a month get all the five dollar things we just were talking about but in addition to those ad-free podcasts you also get our monthly what a cartoon movie podcast where we talk about an animated feature film super in-depth

just like we do the simpsons this month we are wrapping up our final summer of the disney renaissance we've covered all the previous disney renaissance films now we have wrapped it up with mulan pocahontas and at the end of this month tarzan and we have a lot of fun talking about that phil collins musical film and that's just the most recent ones we've almost done six years total of them every month i'd say over 200 hours of that you can hear it all for yourself they're basically like a three podcasts in one to get released each month by us only for our ten dollar a month patrons at patreon.com slash talking simpsons we've covered studio ghibli we've covered tons of pixar movies we've covered crap like cool world and space jam we've even done our longest podcast ever six and a half hours about who framed roger rabbit please see it all for yourself at the ad free super duper movie tier at patreon.com slash talking simpsons

last thing i learned from the production though the cover this is the best thing about the album is the cover the yellow album by bill morrison and i did learn from greg haver that this was one of the first things they did mac reigning showed haver the mock-up of this cover while they were recording he's like yep and this is going to be the cover it's right here and bill morrison is a huge beatles fan and he parodied it perfectly i can't go through every bit of the sergeant pepper collage that is imitated here but two of my favorites are one that it's the tracy ullman simpson standing where the you know original 63 beatles are and then as well on the original sergeant pepper. Pepper cover is a Shirley Temple doll that has a t-shirt that says, Welcome the Rolling Stones.

And on this cover is a Krusty the Clown doll wearing a t-shirt that says, Welcome Ren and Stimpy. Man, seeing that in 1998 must have been crazy. I don't think I caught that detail. A reference to Ren and Stimpy. Y2K is dawning. But it makes sense in 92. Just like how the Rolling Stones were the hotter band than the Beatles then,

it's now a wink towards, well, what's the Rolling Stones for the Simpsons? It's Ren and Stimpy. And Bill Morrison, huge Beatles fan. In recent years, he put out an entire graphic novel adaptation of Yellow Submarine. And I think he currently has a kickstarter for the re-release of his roswell little alien boy series yeah he's a great guy and one of the best simpsons artists around and he also had the honor of being stolen from by a asshole i don't know if you guys remember this but there was that artist cause or k-a-w-s he did a basically like not a parody but just

he basically just put x's over all of the faces on the simpsons on this cover and then sold it as new art and it sold for 15 million dollars insane yeah i'm not sure if you have this henry but bill morrison sergeant pepper's parody would become a couch gag before this album even came out. So we had seen this idea on the show maybe a year or two before. I think Bart After Dark is the episode it aired with. It's different, though. They didn't animate this shot, but yeah, they had used it on the show. Maybe like 96, 97, they thought, this album's never coming out.

Let's just use it as a couch gag instead. But also by this stage, there was already multiple parodies on the show of the simpsons mania stuff they were already making fun of the bart man and sort of the the simpsons the big wave they had early on like that became a running joke on the show before this thing even came out at the start of season four the simpsons go calypso like yeah that was mocking this well should have been four or five months before this album launched i wonder if would i have felt better about this album if i heard it when i was 10 like would i have liked it even slightly would i have some nostalgia for it i don't know i mean going back to simpsons sing the blues i can say definitively it's not a very

good album but i understand why I had any affection for it whatsoever when I was the right age for it. There's some stuff in there, and you'd be like, it's just pandering enough to a child of the right age that, you know, it works. None of this feels like it's pandering to any of the right people is the problem. I don't know who it's actually for

because the jokes aren't particularly good by the The Simpsons standards. The music is largely substandard, and there's just no real hook for any of it beyond an imagined child from maybe like nine years before it came out. Yeah, there was a lot more variety on the Simpsons Sing the Blues. I guess that was one of the positive qualities of it. If you didn't like the Bart rap,

you can listen to Homer and Marge sing a Randy Newman song. You can listen to Burns sing a like rock industrial song or whatever that was in this one it's all kind of the same kind of music except for a few songs that feel like they're cut from a simpsons musical yeah and it's like half bart rap their lesson from the first album was people like bart rapping so that needs to be half of this album I mean the thing I'll say is Nancy Cartwright is a better rapper than you would probably think she should be look the lyrics are god-awful but she is better at staying on time and speaking quickly than probably most other voice actors of her generation I also feel bad what they didn't learn from the first album was like, let Yardley Smith sing a sad ballad.

Why is her song happy? Why is it a celebration song? I don't know. Maybe they just thought Lisa was too much of a bummer at that point or something. They wanted to give her something a little more cheery to be a part of, but it's not working. None of the Lisa stuff on here is even remotely good. Yeah, I agree with Alex. Very few other white ladies from Dayton can rap as well as

Nancy Cartwright. Definitely. She's related to one of the hottest pop stars in the world right now, Sabrina Carpenter. So, you know, it runs in the family. Wait, they're related? Yes, she's Aunt Nancy. Wow. Yeah. Nope. Yeah. All right. I'm very old. Got it. Okay. I have a note for an upcoming 1999 episode we're covering on a podcast. I'm like, Sabrina Carpenter, born this week. Wow. So I would like to start with the song that's not on this album because that also has a chunk of history to it. It's the best one because it's the only one where the characters sound like the way they should yes that song is my name is bart which were it to have been on the

album in the leaked version that it was on it would have been between 10 commandments of bart and i just can't help myself that tracking makes no sense to me because it's like three barts in a row shake it up like i don't know that's not what I would have put on my mixtape. That's for sure. But yeah, so My Name is Bart. It's a parody of Prince. It was supposed to be the big song of the album, just like how they partnered with Michael Jackson for the first one, secretly. They're going to partner with Prince, and they're going to parody what was, when they

were working on it, a soon-to-be-released Prince song. So they weren't parodying an old Prince song. It was more like they were planning, like, oh, you'll launch this, and then a couple months later, Bart's version will come out. Now, how did they get to know Prince? It is because James L. Brooks was working on a not-good-at-all movie, I'll Do Anything. I only watched it in the last month out of prep for this I saw that you logged

it on letterboxd Henry did you watch the version with the songs I know that's available somewhere if you look around the dark corners I tried to hit up our pals on blank check who have seen it but I could not get back from them I don't know if they have their copy anywhere there are a couple clips out there of the song versions from it but but no, I watched the song-free version. Though if you watch Albert Brooks sing the title track, I'll Do Anything, written by Prince, you will know immediately why all the songs were cut. Like, why do you hire Albert Brooks and Nick Nolte for a musical? Or Julie Kavner? The raspiest people on earth.

It's terrible, but the reasoning for this i'd heard was because james l brooks was high on his own supply he had just done broadcast news in terms of endearment and the simpsons he thinks he can do no wrong i totally understand that one of the most successful critically acclaimed and commercially successful creators in hollywood at that time he signs a deal with sony to make a movie and shows there that's why the critic is a sony show because he signed with sony and he was working with polly platt his producer who hooked him up with mac rating which i gotta tell everybody listen to the you must remember this 10 part history on polly platt that is a really great podcast i'm just going through this real

briefly i'm going through this cast list of this movie, I'll Do Anything, which I only vaguely remember. There's Tracy Ullman, Jolie Richardson, Ian McKellen, Anne Heche, Harry Shearer, Rosie O'Donnell. Like, look, these are not all my favorite actors or anything, but this is just a lot of people to be in one movie. You win Oscars working with Brooks. Like, everybody thinks like oh yeah i'm the next big thing with brooks yeah it's just crazy also looking at this budget 40 million dollar budget 10 million dollar box office it was a huge failure it's the kind of thing that only john peters the insane man film producer would agree to yeah so basically what happened

was that brooks wanted to do a He'd never worked in musicals before. That's why there's a crappy musical song on Simpsons Sing the Blues that he wrote, Sibling Rivalry. It's because he was thinking he could do musicals. Oh, yeah, we talked about that. It did seem like the proving ground for could this be part of a musical? And also I had heard from asking one of our Simpsons writer friends that another reason he thought he could make it work is he loved doing the musical segments that were done on the Tracy Ullman show. That's why Tracy Ullman's in this movie, because he's like, oh, I loved working with Tracy to do musicals. Let's do that as a whole movie. course during the production of the movie Tracy Ullman sues to get money out of the Simpsons so

he's having to direct a woman who is suing him currently which also made for a bad set but the other problem was that James L Brooks thought I'll write the script and then add songs in between scenes I won't work with a songwriter in the middle of it it caused a lot of problems he thought him and Prince were going to do it right he finally found Prince in 92 and Prince is like, yeah, I want to make a musical with you. Prince writes between six to eight songs for it, six that get filmed. And there is a funny story in Polly Platt's history that Julie Kavner is on the set singing one of his songs called My Little Pill and Prince is aghast. He's like, what? And Polly Platt said she had to tell him, well, it won't sound like this in the movie. We're going to sweeten it. We'll re-record it.

Don't worry. Don't worry. And she said Prince just wordlessly left the set soon after. And in the movie, yes, Julie Kavner has a major role in it. Harry Shearer says two words in the movie, but you will see him. And Yardley Smith apparently is in the musical cut of it, but got cut out of the theatrical released one. And so I believe what happened was in 92, he's working on this movie with Prince. And so they're also saying, hey, when we worked with Michael Jackson, he did an episode of the show and he wrote a song for us. How about we have Bart sing this version of your song and then we'll also do an episode and it definitely

seems like a James L Brooks thing because the original script assignment for the Prince Comes to Springfield episode was by new writers Ian Deachman and Kristen Rusk who had never written anything before but they were like new Gracie hires he had a lot of faith in and that's the script that Conan uncredited rewrite on okay there's only a couple pages out there from al jean that he shared but it's basically it's leon kompowski is prince again that's the plot but at the same time they also are agreeing him to do the song on this album now in mike reese's memoir and on some dvd commentaries they say it fell out because prince is weird which i totally understand and they say that he one of their stories you know too bob is like they said he got the wrong script or he got

like a fan script by a chauffeur that's one yeah he was referring to a script his driver gave him and it was not the script that they sent him and they couldn't really communicate this is not the script that you're going to be doing this is someone else's and i guess that's when communications broke down he leaves the project and they just torch the script that would also explain why they then don't put out this song but there is another key part to this too which is that as prince super fans know in 1992 and in 93 that's when he starts battling warner records and his record label where he you maybe have seen the pictures of where he writes the word slave on his cheek to express how he was feeling controlled by his record label he changes

his name to an unpronounceable symbol to make it impossible to promote and specifically the song my name is prince is like unreleased for a couple years like this album because of that. So I do think the Prince issue as well is why they couldn't release this in 93 with Prince. And I do think that might have something to do with why they just sat on it for a year because they're like, well, if we can't have the Prince song on this, why are we bothering? Yeah. I mean, with all due respect to the Wilson sisters and C&C Music Factory, who are certainly worthy musicians to have on a record like that, if Prince is your marquee artist, nothing else matters. Nothing else on that record is important from a promotional standpoint because you have Prince on it.

Yeah, I'm not a big Prince head, but I have never heard this song, My Name is Prince, until I did research for this album. I don't know if it's a popular song or if it became popular. I watched the video for the first time. There is a pre-video sketch in which Kirstie Alley plays a news reporter. God, that's like the most 90s thing you could possibly describe. I always thought the song was weird. I'm more of a heard-the-radio-hits-and-watch-some-of-the-movies-Prince-fans. I'm not like a mega Prince fan.

But I do really enjoy his music. When I heard this song, again, to prep for this, I was like, it's weird in 1992 to make a song that's like basically like introducing yourself. Like this is like a song 10 years into his career saying, my name is Prince and I am funky. It just feels oddly timed. Yeah, the timing is a little weird. It's not one of his best songs by any stretch, but it's like fine. The main thing about Prince is that that dude wrote so many songs he wrote so much music over the years and you know a lot of it never even made it onto any records or anything but like that dude was just a machine

he would just churn out tracks at such an insane pace and i have to imagine it's like yeah sometimes those songs are not really that memorable or they come at weird times or whatever it's just that the way that guy's brain worked was he could not stop writing music. Yeah, 20 plus years ago before podcasting, I would listen to An Evening with Kevin Smith, one of his spoken word DVDs, oh, Prince just films videos for fun and there is so much unreleased music and video content that we'll never see the light of day. He's just weird. He'll pay to fund these things and then he won't do anything with them.

Yeah, he's a real artist that way in the sense that he just goes where the creativity takes him and he doesn't care if anyone actually sees it or not. He just puts the best stuff out there and everything else out there is just to amuse himself. I was thinking that my evening with Kevin Smith thing too, Bob, just that in how little story there is out there about this album because that Kevin Smith relates the bit that he intentionally avoided signing an NDA so he could tell these stories

because apparently Prince got a lot of people to sign a lot of NDAs anytime they worked with him so they wouldn't be telling stories about him. Maybe that's why we also haven't heard why My Name is Bart was stripped from the album by the 1998 release. And going back briefly to the Prince episode of The Simpsons, it could be our conspiracy theory, it could be someone else's, but I remember hearing that it seems to have been reworked into Bart's inner child because the premise of the Prince episode is Prince comes to Springfield, everyone loosens up a bit. And that's sort of the Brad Goodman

story with that episode. So I imagine some of the material found its way into that episode or other episodes. I remember that theory. Unfortunately, the pages Al Jean released are the only ones I could find out there. And those are just two pages where Prince is referenced on it. One is where Lisa is failing to get tickets to a Prince show. So it seemed like it was also about how, well, Leon befriended Bart before. Now he's going to help Lisa in this one as he returns thinking he's Prince.

And then the other one is when Patty and Selma say they've seen all of his movies, including Sign of the Times, which then Prince replies, even I haven't seen that one. Let's hear a little bit of My Name is Bart just to see how it does sound better

than the other tracks on this album, thanks to not being fucked around with, probably. My name is Bart And I am funky My name is Bart The one I am funky. My name is Bart, the one and only. I did not come to eat around. Let's get this straight. Let's get it down.

I've seen those t-shirts. I've seen that face. I've seen the phony Bart all over the place. That Bart's a bootleg That Bart's a fake He's out to fool you, man He's on the take I clipped that including because

I love that it's about the bootleg Barts Like it is Bart responding to bootleg Bart shirts That's fun It's the most self-aware thing anywhere on this album Like it feels like it's actually the people who make this show making a commentary about the simpsons versus just trying to shoehorn a bunch of like lame songs into the simpsons format and it's them reflecting on how where they're at too it feels aware yeah and there's some degree of cleverness in that it's

a parody and then the character singing the parody is accused of stealing halfway through the song it feels like they're doing something fun there's so many of the songs this album in which there are no bits nothing playful is happening it's just a straight performance of a song yeah and the production on it is very that era of prince like i mean obviously they're covering you know essentially a song by prince or parodying it but like the way the the drum samples are the things that they are throwing into that song, it feels like a Prince song. Like maybe not one of his best, but certainly something that is in line with that. This is Bart just singing over the backing track of My Name is Prince.

It's down to like, yeah. I wasn't sure if they had changed some of the samples or something just to not make it exactly the same. But yeah, I listened to them side by side at the same time and went insane and as i went insane i could tell no this is the same track i think they changed the tempo ever so slightly because nancy does sing this a little slower than print okay well if you want to confuse people at your karaoke night you can put on my name is prince and sing my name is bart and no one will care because no one knows the original song anyways. It's fun in the song, he says, some dude from Minnesota, he came and stole it.

Also rather corny that in the middle of the song, Lisa tattles on him to Marge, and Marge sounds like short smarts of going like, well, you should come clean, bar. Apologize to that man. So this song did appear on promotional copies of the album so in 93 this was the story and i did find a scan of what looks to be a geffen released to like radio stations or a and r this is the album here it is and it's tracks in order and this was track seven on it and i believe the clips we hear are off of that because you know that leaked enough that then people uploaded it online and now it just lives on youtube so this was released in 93 i would love to get my hands on that cd from 93 of all

of the tracks to see if they don't sound as crappy as they do on the 98 version yeah i did some cursory searching to see if there was any copies of that promotional version of it anywhere online and the answer seems to be no it's too bad i do like that they reference underachiever and proud of it the controversial t-shirt which would have been crazy to hear about in 1998 if this was on the album but they have to rhyme it with lyle love it another very timely reference though also to reference n Nirvana and hear that in 98 is also confusing. Yeah. But also in 93, don't remind people they could be listening to Nirvana. Like, or any better music.

Yes. And this is the first of many long breakdowns in the songs. And also, I believe I clocked it as 30 seconds of saxophone solo in this. Oh, God. On this album, a shortcut to padding is, what if Lisa played the saxophone? I feel that happens four or five times throughout. I mean, there's like one commentary in there. I don't know if that was actually George Clinton or just one of the other P-Funk all-stars.

It's like, you've got a big horn, don't you? Like, they're really calling attention to that saxophone aspect. They're doing the stretch it out maneuver as they're talking to Lisa. I mean, just from a pure numbers game, you were saying it before, like nearly an over 70 minute album. I saw a YouTube upload of Simpsons Sing the Blues that is just the full album, not in sections. It's 38 minutes. They must have had a message of like, these songs have to be longer for it to feel more valuable. So it ends up being like a 20 minutes longer record there's three songs on this record that are over

five minutes and no simpsons parody song or novelty song should ever be longer than three minutes yeah when i clicked on a song and i saw that it was seven minutes i was eyeing my bar cart yeah about it but yeah by the end of the song bart has to apologize and i know the last minute of it is for radio djs to just talk over and fade out from but it's a minute a minute of instrumental at the end unnecessary but all right enough about songs not on this album so let's start with track one yeah let's talk about the stuff that's high quality here the stuff that made the cut. I want to assure all of our listeners that when you hear these clips, Henry did not make a mistake.

The characters sound like this throughout the album. And everybody in the reviews complains about this aspect. And maybe Alex has more insight into why they would do this. Do you think some producer just felt, oh, nobody wants to hear them sound like this. And they were pitched up to maybe sound more musical or more pleasing to the ear. It just sounds like they got sound-alikes, and no character sounds like what you want them to sound like. You know, we've seen The Simpsons for so long. We've been doing this podcast for 10 years.

It just feels like a dagger in my brain when I hear high-pitched Homer, high-pitched Marge, chipmunk Bart and Lisa, a poo sounding nothing like Hey, Kazaria. I'm going to be complaining about this constantly, but it's so wrong. It's really bad, and it's something I noticed immediately when listening to the record. It was like, these voices do not—like, Bart is maybe the one that sounds the closest to how you remember it on the show, but everyone else is pitched so much higher than they normally—including, you know, Yardley Smith, who does not need that at all for her voice. The only thing I could think of, and it was the thing i thought of immediately when i started hearing these voices is that it's a little bit of chipmunkification which is to say that it is a

speeding up i think slightly maybe of what they had on record and i'm wondering if somewhere along the way when they were adjusting the production of these songs everything got bumped up slightly more in terms of tempo and that forced them to speed up the vocal tracks which inherently causes your voice to sound higher when you do that it's the only explanation i can think of that makes any sense at all because otherwise this is the days before autotune they weren't really doing that for the most part on albums and in fact i think 98 is the year that that share album came out where autotune kind of started becoming like a big thing but otherwise there's no reason why you would do this it doesn't change the pitch that much as far as i can tell it seems like you know these voice actors would certainly know how to sing in these

voices because they have done it many times over all it does it feels like what like what happens when I'm in, you know, Adobe Audition and I need to speed something up. That's what the voice just kind of sounds like by default when I do that. So this album would have been even longer if they didn't speed it up. I think so, yeah. I mean, despite that, I think I might enjoy this album for as bad as it is, maybe 20% more if the characters sounded like how they should. I'd at least get the Pavlovian response to hearing the voices and having good feelings about my associations with them. As it stands,

I just, I'm like, who are these people? Why am I listening to this? I'm in hell. Yeah. The song Love with an interrobang, that is the first track and it gets you right in there with a new Bart rap that starts exactly like Deep Deep Trouble's rap as well. In my notes, I have, this has none of the wit and sparkle of Deep Deep Trouble. That's what happened when you don't get DJ Jazzy Jeff to help produce your second album. It's another one of those getting out of bed, describing my day raps. Yeah, and not a good one. The lead writer on it is one half of the co-founders of CNC Music Factory, Robert Cliveles.

But they were fresh when they would have recorded this. They were fresh off of Everybody Dance Now and Things That Make You Go. They were kings of pop at that time. I guess you can hear a little, this feels like minimum energy CNC Music Factory. Though honestly, a lot of these tunes just make me think of playing a sega genesis video game yeah a lot of this music sounds like it's from super adventure island and if you're a big enough nerd you know what i'm talking about the other creditor writers on it are just the other musicians on it so i'm assuming he was the lead writer and as describing your day thing goes it's also very distracting that

bart's mirror image is nancy doing her nelson voice so strange the refrain or the chorus or whatever you want to call it on this i don't know if it's quoting an existing song or doing something like that but i'm wondering is this sherry and terry singing because russie taylor is on the album i'm wondering if that's the intent behind these female singers that was my read as well when i heard it i look at the rack list here and russie taylor is not a singer on this particular one but spiritually i could definitely see the chorus is that i mean they're just hitting like here we go here we go like these are like the public domain rap hip-hop breakdowns you put in things

of like here we go go go as they put in other ones too i just feel like the cnc guys are not trying very hard and then then they surprise you at the end of this song that after a very long setup of bart describing going places and seeing things and seeing people kissing for a very long time then we find out that this is actually adapting two minutes of an episode Bart's Friend Falls in Love. I've always wondered, what if this episode was a rap? Would have made it so much better. Except in this rap, Bart learns no lessons at the end of it in my little clip here.

As I follow the yellow brick road Wait a minute, whoa, horsey, whoa What do I see? Do my eyes deceive me? Go! His heart is full, his brain's gone south. He doesn't even care that she's a metal mouth. Hey, come on, Milhouse, let's get the wet out. Lovey-dovey stuff is weird as I'll get out. Here we go. Okay, if that's the way you feel, you'll never get me, the Bartman of steel. Here we go. I earned a lot today, man, you know. The clock is getting dark, so you're bad, though.

What's this work all about? What's this work all about? What's this work all about? Like I can just see Sherry and Terry in my mind singing that chorus. Yeah, I also clocked two mentions of Bartman. I don't know how smooth that would have gone down in 98, just hearing about Bartman. Oh, yeah. No, a year before this on the show, they did a joke that nobody knows about the Bartman. Yeah, I'm listening to this.

You're right. It is just stock standard hip hop beats. Like everything about this is just so like, and again, hip hop beats from 91, 92. Like this is that Tone Loke era. This is that, you know, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice era of hip hop production before like, you know, certainly before gangster rap, before like any of that stuff really took hold and kind of became the default sound for hip hop. It is just generic ass radio friendly hip hop. In the years in between this, not only has the chronic come out, but like gangster rap

has kind of come and gone. Yeah. Like Tupac's greatest hits album is one of the best selling records of 1998. The song is drawing from the crisscross well, if anything. Yeah, definitely. I can see, for the same reason you get Vanilla Ice in your Ninja Turtles movie, you're like, these are the raps kids like, and this is a kid's album. Yeah, this is the level of hip-hop we are willing to target at 10-year-olds.

I also feel bad for Pamela Hayden, because Milhouse gets referenced in this song, but he doesn't get to sing, so Pamela Hayden because Milhouse gets referenced in this song, but he doesn't get to sing. So Pamela Hayden doesn't get like whatever extra money she would have gotten from recording this album. Give her the Harry Shearer money. Whatever that was. Also, I'm bothered by this in other songs too, but lyrically that Bart wastes so much time describing everything. The only action that happens in the song is eventually he sees Milhouse and is upset that it causes tension.

And then he instantly goes like, well, that's all right, whatever. I've learned a lot today, man. You know, the park is getting dark. So yo, gotta go. It's like, how dare you cut it off? Like, well, running out of time, guys. Gotta go.

Bart, you spent an entire verse describing your breakfast. It's such a cheat. It's profoundly lazy. And and again the thing i say about nancy cartwright's rapping is that she is just very good at staying on beat and maintaining a flow the lyrics are just atrocious her lyrics don't get better later in this no but first we have the first of two full covers on this album sisters are doing it for themselves with lisa singing with ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart.

Now, I did enjoy part of the research, which was pausing this and looking at my favorite Heart songs, including What About Love? Fantastic. The biggest danger for me doing this album was when I heard My Name is Bart, I listened to some Prince songs I love. And then I had to go back to this. I listened to both the original version of this song and a heart song, too, to remember. And then for the next song, I also listened to a lot of Linda Ronstadt songs. And I was like, God, I don't want to go back to Simpsons. But this is a great song.

The thing is, Sisters Are Doing It For Theirselves, legitimately fantastic song. A song that is also a joke in a Simpsons episode. Isn't that what Bart and Milhouse are singing that one time when they're bouncing up on on the bed in drag where Homer asked for the not gay excuse that's right yeah yeah this got me to look up the original video with Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin and it's great yeah it's basically a clip show of feminism but they're having fun on stage too it's a terrific song high energy and they're trying to capture that energy in this cover and they get nowhere near close to it and harder doing their best yeah I'd say like in there you know they get nowhere near close to it and harder doing their best yeah i'd say like and they're you know they're doing good though they can't be credited as heart

not in the liner notes either it's just that ann and nancy wilson are singing on this they don't have permission for this to be branded as a heart song and lisa's singing with heart which even by 92 heart was about to hit a hiatus i believe and. And if I remember correctly, weren't there a lot of mean jokes about the Wilsons? Yes, there were. The 80s were the time when everyone kind of seized on the Wilsons not being like, you know, hot or something. Because in the 80s, they kind of went and did their hair metal thing.

And I think they kind of stood out, you know, compared to a lot of the very drug addled and heavily beautified hair metal people out there. But yeah, people were making a lot of mean jokes about them, you know i mean look they're rock royalty no one deserves that but yeah i think heart by this stage was definitely they had already gone through their hair metal revamp and they were kind of about to not really be a thing for a good long time by the time this album came out i believe they had done a behind the music to show you where they were in their career yeah you know i'm trying to limit the amount of comments i have to make about the pitching up of characters but patty

and selma are on this they're barely on it but when they enter the song they are so pitched up they sound like zorak yeah it's wrong sisters yeah it's the most wrong any character sound on this actually here i have that let's hear the last verse of the song where Patty and Selma come in. Can you see, can you see, can you see There's a woman standing right next to you Sisters are doing it for themselves Standing on their own two feet

And ringing on their own bells And Patty and Selma come sing Sisters are doing it for themselves Standing on their own two feet And ringing on their own bells Sisters are doing it, doing it Doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. Sisters are doing it for themselves.

Ooh. Ooh. Yeah. Sisters are doing it for themselves. Yeah. A wreck. They're very low in the mix there. Yes.

Yeah. It's bad. One thing that sounded very wrong to my ears for 1998 was when lisa says this is incredible female power we were in the girl power era she got the terminology completely wrong that's true man covering a song from 1985 in 92 felt a little old then and by 98 98, it's made for VH1. And yeah, I will give the Wilson sisters credit for they're trying to match, you know, Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin. And they're doing a good job. They hit some good notes.

Yeah, they're good singers in their own right. They're not them. They're not Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin, but they're great singers in their own right. And I feel bad for Julie Kavner being asked to like sing and Patty and Selma on this. So I can see why they buried it in there. But this is definitely one where you notice some of the really egregious toning up of Yardley Smith. And it's just, it sounds so wrong. I feel like they had the same setting that they applied to everybody.

And you notice it the least on Nancy. And maybe they had a setting for Nancy that they then just applied to all the voice actors. Yeah, I don't know. Whatever it is, because you can almost hear like a weird compression on it, too. It feels like a very cheaply done effect more than anything else. Get ready for Las Vegas style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas Strip excitement MGM is famous for when you play classics like MGM Grand Millions or popular games like Blackjack, Baccarat, and Roulette.

With our ever-growing library of digital slot games, a large selection of online table games, and signature BetMGM service, there is no better way to bring the excitement and ambiance of Las Vegas home to you than with BetMGM Casino. Download the BetMGM Casino. Download the BetMGM Casino app today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. BetMGM.com for T's and C's. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.

How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. Okay, it's official. We are very much in the final sprint to Election Day. And face it, between debates, polling releases, even court appearances, it can feel exhausting, even impossible to keep up with.

I'm Brad Nilkey. I'm the host in a quick, straightforward way that's easy to understand with just enough context so you can listen, get it, and go on with your day. So, kickstart your morning. Start smart with Start Here and ABC News because staying informed shouldn't feel overwhelming. You have worked so hard to make your business into a reality. But achieving your next business goal, that can be overwhelming. What if you had someone to talk through the options and the next steps with? Someone who wants to see your business succeed while giving you peace of mind. That's why the bankers at Merchants Bank are here,

ready with exceptional service every step of the way. Let's dream together. Visit merchantsbank.com to get started. Merchants Bank is a proud member of FDIC. So then this takes us to the third track on the album, the second and last cover on the album, which is a cover of the 1961 Willie Nelson standard, Funny How Time Slips Away, which is a beautiful song. And if you want somebody to do a beautiful

cover of a song linda ronstadt is one of the greatest you can get i can't hate this song no i like hearing linda ronstadt sing songs i'll listen to any song any day of the week it's meant to capitalize on her 1992 appearance on the show and i have a few issues with this number one it should be barney singing with her because they have a connection homer never met linda ronstadt. And my pitch up comment for this song is, you know, when Batty and Selma are pitched up, they sound like Zorak. When Dan's Homer voice is pitched up, he sounds like Grandpa Simpson because that's essentially what he's doing with his Homer voice to become Grandpa. So it sounds like Grandpa has a duet with Linda Ronstadt and with Marge later in the album. So that happened to me when I was listening to this.

Is it anyone else or Every Summer With You, whichever the other Big Dan one is? I thought it was Grandpa at the beginning. I was like, I just figured this was the Grandpa song. Okay, but it's not apparently. It would work better as Grandpa remembering something with her. And also, Funny How Time Slips Away is funnier for an old man to do it too. But this would be way better and funnier with Barney.

Like, it's just Dan doing a duet with Linda Ronstadt. They don't even have a joke in there. Literally, on the other Dan appearances, you can tell he's at least, like, improvising something mildly funny as Homer. But here, there's nothing by the way if you listen to like the classic willie nelson version of this it's a minute shorter because they added a fucking minute instrumental in the middle where that's where jokes could have gone yeah there could have been a little back and forth between them yeah let's hear just a minute of this and then i have some breaking news to share with you guys that's why i was looking at my phone here how's your new love? I hope that he's

doing fine. I heard you told him that you'd love him till the end of time. Now that's the same thing That you told me Seems like just another day Ain't it funny How time slips away

You know, I gotta give Dan credit on this one. It's not good, but if I'm told I have to be on a song with Linda Ronstadt, that would scare the living shit out of me on every level. And he is kind of having to william shatner his way through some of these verses but when it's time for him to sing along with her he is not shying away and i do give him credit for that yeah he is great at singing in the homer voice and just singing in general yeah i wish he just gave he could have had a line here or there of like context of oh don't let Marge hear this one or whatever. Because tone almost feels like we used to date, but not anymore.

I mean, that's the message of the song. The song is about you're seeing somebody you used to be with and now they're with somebody new. But again, that's why this is even a more senseless pick to like, one, have Linda Ronstadt doing this with Homer of all people. This feels like it was written as a Lurleen thing. like this would be a Lurleen joke with Homer or something but then they had Linda Ronstadt on the show we'll just do Linda and it's like you're trying to mesh some things together that don't actually make for a joke I have to imagine on the recording day Dan Castellaneta was having some fun with Linda Ronstadt yeah improvising with her and they just left it on the cutting room floor maybe they wanted this like no let's have this be the one pure song on this novelty album well I think

the song should end with Wiggum going really Willie Nelson so the breaking news I teased was so last night I thought to myself the same thing you did Bob about her being in Mr. Plow and I was like wait I've been asking John Vitti all these questions. I didn't ask him this because John Vitti wrote Mr. Plow. And we'd asked him before. He was at the recording for Linda Ronstad. He recorded that episode's dialogue for her with her. So I asked him if he knew anything about this because they would have been at the same time.

And he just replied to me like right now, a minute ago folks john vd is retired but we're keeping him busy but basically he relates that yes it was my single favorite experience as a simpsons writer was standing next to linda ronstadt when she sings however he then clarifies and i paraphrase here that john vd found out that she's on the yellow album when i emailed him about this oh wow so clearly it was done after his guess is it was decided months after they recorded the mr plow scene so he had no clue that linda ronstadt was on the yellow album you're surprising simpsons writers with the existence of this thing i mean this thing is it really seems like this is an illustration of just how divested they were from this project, the entire writers room. Like they just had no input on it whatsoever.

I forget who, but one of the writers I asked said they gave away their platinum album for Sings the Blues recently because they felt no pride. Wow. They're just like, I don't need this. Who needs a platinum album on the wall for this? Well, all these Emmys are clocking up the shelf space. You better get rid of something. After I heard this Linda Ronstadt duet, it made me just pull up on my walk this morning.

Every song she sang with the Muppets, and it's beautiful. I literally was tearing up listening to her sing her final duet with Kermit on there, which, again, I always, every time I listen to that, I'm like, okay, Linda Ronstadt and Jim Henson definitely had an affair. tearing up listening to her sing her final duet with kermit on there which again i always every time i listen to that i'm like okay linda ronstadt and jim henson definitely had an affair i feel sure of that every time i watch that scene she seems like she's very game for anything if it wasn't in ron howard's documentary it's not true i believe a linda ronstadt's bedpost is barney

gumbel is jim henson and george lucas on the george lucas talk show podcast i remember hearing a story told by a former lucasfilm employee of like flying somewhere with steven spielberg george lucas and their girlfriends at the time and then on the flight george lucas was making out with linda ronstadt the entire flight imagine that george lucas i'm trying not to we're all quiet because we're just thinking about it yeah we're thinking of current george lucas at the entire flight. Imagine that. George Lucas. I'm trying not to. We were all quiet because we're just thinking about it now. Yeah. We're thinking of current George Lucas.

I'm trying to think how to jettison that thought from my brain permanently. But okay, so going from a nice little duet from Willie Nelson, we then get the, I'd say the most like attempting to be funny song on the whole album and the only one that's written

by a writer from the show really I mean I guess you can count the last track as sort of that too but this is an original song written for it by Jeff Martin he wrote look at all these idiots for the first album the best song on that one I think too like as a Simpson song yeah and he's trying to do the same here yeah this does feel like apu the musical it feels like this could be the first song in an apu themed musical stage performance and it tries to make the most jokes they don't always work it's really just here's a list of things he sells here's a list of rules at the quickie mart and then he's robbed it kind of feels like a song version of the beginning of his bit from that like all the all the little skits of Springfield, like the one where he goes to the backyard party and closes the shop for like five minutes to go party.

It feels like the setup for that, but in a whole ass song where he's just talking about how busy he is and he can never do anything. Like you said, here's just a list of all the shit I sell. And this also includes weird backstory for Apu that would be contradicted by the actual show before this album came out, where in the song, Apu says he came to America to be a movie star, and he thought that

was going to work out for him. But we know he came here as a computer IT guy or a computer science guy. Yeah. But way different path, more realistic path for an Indian immigrant.

Yeah, the jokes here are the typical ones at the time of like that Apu is the hardest working person in Springfield and is also overlooked as an immigrant and is always trying to sell heavily salted snack treats to people. And I think this is nice that Hank Azaria, who was left out of Sings the Blues because he was relatively new then, they write a song just for him. And also Jeff Martin wrote a lot of early Apu stuff. Like he's the guy who gave Apu his last name

based on an Indian immigrant he knew growing up as a kid. Jeff Martin is a great songwriter, I think. He says he wasn't bothered by it, but I am a little bothered that John Boylan like fucked around with what was probably an even better song by Jeff Martin. My sole pitch-up comment on this one is that hank azaria as much as i love his performance as a poo it is a very broad accent a lot of people can do and when you change the way he sounds it sounds like literally anyone is doing this song it doesn't sound like

hank at all yeah the pitched up homer you can tell it's dan the pitched up nancy and yardley you can tell it's those characters but here it just sounds like oh a guy can do an indian accent let's bring him in right this is the video game version of a poo where they couldn't get the actual actors yes the only way i can tell it's his area is that he actually in some of the breakdowns has a couple of cute improv bits that sound like what his area would improvise like that feels like the difference but it's funny that the song starts with basically the Big Bopper parody. It's his hello, baby.

Instead, explaining why he can't do stuff. Let's hear a little bit of it here. It won't help to make a fuss. I do not make change for the bus. To use the restroom, you must be an employee. I'm working 24 hours a day. But don't leave no time left to play

we're open 24 hours a day but don't leave no time left to play no no no and then the song in my opinion reaches its end at two minutes but they have to have an extension for it. And I at least like they try to give him like a ballad in the middle of the song instead of just like a meandering instrumental. The tone changes to this sad ballad here. I came to this country from a far away subcontinent with dreams to make a fortune in the movie industry but instead i'm making squishies in a checkered vest oh how i wish the camera on the ceiling wasn't just there for security That sounds the most Jeff Martin-y of all the surrounding music.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, there aren't really any good jokes in there, but it's the actor getting to try to do something at least. You know, there's a little bit of riffing there, and it's, like you said, it's better than just having a minute and a half of saxophone for no reason. I also do like that Azaria kind of he notices the tone shift in the song and he goes like, OK, I feel better now. Back to the. And he's like 24.

Like, yeah. And then it ends with them stealing from themselves a joke from separate vocations about the nylon rope. So sensual against my skin. They just reuse it. They just have it happen though this is his area song so he could have also sang his snake briefly in this you know robbing him i guess snake was not as well established yet and the only connection i can think of with his dream of making movies is the bid in brush with greatness where marge is going to the community college and Apu is writing a script called Hands Off My Jerky Turkey. Oh yeah. Yeah I guess that plus his involvement in community theater maybe they're building a different backstory for Apu that later

writers would ignore. I prefer his computer science background I think they got a little more out of that though you know in later Ap appearances, I feel like they kind of forgot that, too, about. Yeah. You know, in season five, just speaking of rejected Apu lore, there is a deleted scene that we'll get to in the Homer and Apu episode where that would have set up that Apu's hair is a wig and that he is fully bald, which I'm really glad they cut that and that is not canonical. After Pooh gets robbed, the song is over and then it comes time for the longest song, the one written by a wonderful man, co-written by Greg Haver. Thank you. Thank you, Greg.

It's the Ten Commandments of Bart. It's very long. It's so long. It's so long and it's so not funny. Matt Groening said it was going to be a Ten Commandments parody and I feel like if it's a Ten Commandments parody, you can't cut two commandments to make it a shorter song.

You got to have all ten. But also, I'd say there's like 10% of this song is then just singing in between the commandments to be like, and yeah, then we're doing this and also that, and they're killing time between the many commandments. There is no reason you can't write a shorter version of those commandment bits, though. That's the thing, is that they are still luxuriating and just lounging in this song that just does not go anywhere.

You get sick of the device after two commandments, and once you realize, oh, the commandment always rhymes with the number, I can guess what you're going to say the second you say commandment number nine. Couple of fun side bits for haver had about the recording of this one that yes that dan nancy and yardley were all around together for recording of this they were all there probably recording multiple songs that day but he says that when they were doing a sax solo in the song they did intentionally get the man who regularly plays the sax for Lisa back then, Doug Norwine, who did the saxophone solos on the show.

So that's cute. And then he also says his then-wife helped with some of the backing vocals. And also his dog, Twinkle, does some of the barking on it. So it's a real family affair for the Haver family on this. So that's nice. Yeah. That's a real family affair for the haver family on this so that's nice yeah that's a nice thing and also he did say that the one thing he got a big note on to make a change was he had his

own version of pacifier sucking but fox said it has to be the real one from the show and he was sent a dat to his home in wales that said maggie sucks, who had into it, which he says he still has that recording marked Maggie sucks in his home. And yes, that Matt Groening was there for all the recordings and that he basically thought like when Groening said, well, do you think I should change something in this? Haver's main opinion was like, well, this is your show. Like, let's go with your tracks. And so we end up with, here's a little of the 10 commandments here just one i'll make you listen to thank you henry next up here is commandment number six

goes like this that's a dance like lunatics gotta get moving and shaking and moving and popping and mopping and flippity-popping hey what happened beatbox is broke maggie come here quick i'm starting to choke come on girl here's the. I'm really stuck and I need your help, so Maggie, please start sucking. Oh, yeah, that's it. That's what I require, an inspired baby sister with an ultra-hip pacifier. And now we arrive at commandment number five. Short and sweet, that you'll be alive. Take off your pants, strut around in the nude.

If somebody sees you, say, what's happening, dude? Man. I'll tell you, salt in the moon for me is the guy who goes, if you want to be happy. That guy. I had to plug my nose for that. There's two things about this song that leap out at me a little bit, other than the fact that it's terrible.

The production on it is so 1991 club music like it is right plugged into the kind of stuff you would have heard like cnc music factory crystal waters like that kind of stuff from that era and the other thing is that when bart says the maggie starts second line the thing that should have followed it was just the sound of a car accident like it's that jarring and such a fucking screeching halt to that song. I know what they're doing. Obviously, they're going to Maggie on the pacifier. But that line, for any kid of any age, you would hear that and you would just start giggling

uncontrollably. It's such a terrible lyric. The lyric, Maggie, please start sucking, followed by commandment number five, take off all your clothes. Yeah. Yes. There's some real sickos writing this album like you greg that that puts it in the same echelon as that like

bootleg kids bop version of hot in here that should be fucking illegal like it's not good okay if i'm trying to deconstruct how mac rainey came to write this uh-huh it is definitely a pile of words like some of his best life in hell comics that are so wordy and this is heavily written and verbose just like those there's a lot of life in hells i was just reading them again recently that are just like they are lists they are a list of things and so this is a list of 10 things but half of i swear the commandments are dancing three of them are shake your rear end dance like lunatics and shalt be alive, which is basically just dancing. And then thou shalt slam the door is telling you to make sound by slamming the door.

And thou shalt do exactly what you want to do. That also sounds like he's telling you to dance in that one, too. Mostly, half of it's telling you to dance. Yeah, did you mention thou shalt go wild? That's another one, I believe. Oh, yes. That is a dance-based command. Thou shalt go wild because you'll never get to heaven you're right that's also dancing yeah yeah and then the other ones are thou shalt always make rhymes thou shalt always

procrastinate thou shalt question authority which that is a huge thing for grading in life and hell too so that makes it feel like his and then the final one thou shalt have fun which they have been repeating for six minutes straight in the song before you get to commandment number one this song you could maybe make a three and a half minute version that is like tolerable the six minute version is just excruciating from top to bottom it's twice as long as it should be and you know greg you had your assignment you did the song you're supposed to do salute you greg yeah and also another lisa sax solo to kill time in a tube if it was two minutes shorter it would still be over four minutes yeah i also dislike that in a song that has to kill times lyrically bart still has the

line if you want more details come back later like how oh that is literally just the musical equivalent of giving up yeah i mean we could say more things but this song is so long 10 commandments but it also does feel like deep deep trouble but a worse version in that homer shows up to be like bart do this like you get homer showing up to be mad at bart during the song too at least lisa gets the last word soardley gets to be part of the song and would have gotten some royalties were this to have been released in any way that would have been popular though I don't think this could have been the music video because budget wise they could not make a six minute music video that would cost so much money though when I think what would have

been the music video I guess maybe I just can't help myself maybe maybe that would have been it I mean that's still a five minute song yeah I just can't help myself. Maybe. Maybe that would have been it. I mean, that's still a five-minute song. Yeah. I just can't help myself song. There's been so many minutes of Bart rapping so far, I completely forget how this one even goes. And I took a lot of notes. That is what is egregious and pacing to me, which if you did have in between this, my name is Bart, maybe not. But still, you would have gone from Ten Commandments of Bart, a lot of Bart rapping.

My name is Bart. Bart essentially rapping again. And then I Just Can't Help Myself, which is technically, it's a trio rap. It's basically a Tribe Called Quest song, where it's just each guy gets to do a rap. But you start with Bart rapping. And so when I got to that next song, right after almost seven minutes of Ten Commandments of Bart, I was like, you can't have a Bart rap right after this. This is terrible. And it's another one about what a bad boy he is. But then we get Lisa's rap,

which is I have anxiety and Homer's rap, which is I like food. A list of food. While meanwhile, Lisa's rap does not rhyme in the last half. She's trying to rhyme there with Homer. Yeah, there's a few stretches in there for sure. So I just can't help myself that's the other one written by the other half of cnc which is david cole it's honestly kind of a weak tune but don't want to be too mean david cole he was dead by the time this album was released he passed away in 1995 three years gone only at the age of 32 he was gay it was rumored

to be aids related complications but there's never been any confirmation on that so just to make you feel extra sad while you're listening to this think about that a man tragically died at a young age after writing this and distinctly possible this might be the last thing of his that he ever released right that ever was released oh boy i think you're right yeah that many years after the fact it has to be but like the other one this is cnc music factory working at limited capacity on one pass they're not doing a second prefix on this it starts with bart also the go go maybe i was thinking tribe because it reminded me of what's the scenario with the go go go like that then i wanted to

include since we haven't heard a ton of it, let's hear Homer's section of the song. How about a snack? Just a soft sandwich or a cold six pack? A big bag of pork rinds, that couldn't hurt Some cake for dessert to keep my mind alert It takes a lot of energy to do this rap I feel kinda sleepy, better take a nap Not too long a nap, two hours that's a winner I wouldn't wanna sleep to a roast beef dinner Roast beef with gravy and potatoes

Hot rolls and butter, lettuce and tomatoes I know I shouldn't eat it, I gotta keep my health But what the hey, I can't help myself. I can't help it. I just can't help myself. I can't help it. I just can't help myself. This is the most youth pastor ass, like junior high school assembly ass,

my name is Homer and I'm here to say ass rap anywhere on this record. When Rapper's Delight came out and they just list food at a barbecue, like, it was innovative. This is released 20 years later almost. Doesn't feel that way as Homer's listing all the food he wants to eat. Yeah, my one note is I would replace roast beef with pork chops. That was Homer's signature food in this era. They really messed up on that one. Yeah, and they included pork rinds, that was a homer joke early on then but no pork chops but i guess roast beef was a thing they were rhyming with i mean this also

just feels like so rudimentary rhyme dictionary stuff yeah everything about this is just cheap and junky and like you know dan seems like a good sport on this one but like even he seems not fully bought into the stuff he is having to say here and just also i just can't help myself can't help it just can't like it also is just more you do what you want to do again that was the message of the last song that was seven minutes long and it's not even a good chorus like it's just like the hook is not catchy like nothing is working here it also reminded me like the streets of rage yeah music yeah like menu music yeah this is every japanese video game made between 1991 and 1993 and you know what they had to save money and gotten better results if they'd hired yuzo kishiro for this instead so all right enough of these rap let's instead get to we were

hearing cnc music factory working at minimum effort what about funk legends working at minimum effort this song is seven minutes long i grew an entire full beard by the time i finished listening to it now she's coming out swinging that length of a song is pretty much standard for a parliament funkadelic or p-Funk All-Stars song. Most of them are this long. Definitely. Yeah, they love to just fuck around and just play these long stretches of weird funk, you know, improvisation stuff. So this does kind of fit. It does not make it more listenable, though.

I'm glad Alex said that because one of my notes is, this is just a bunch of fucking around, I guess. I will say, for the fucking around, it at least sounds like Yardley Smith had a good time in recording in person with George Clinton on this yeah I have to imagine it's a very hard thing to have a bad time hanging out with George Clinton

I want to imagine they shared a spliff on that day in the recording studio I wish Dr. Funkenstein gave me confidence to sing I just don't have it again if you listen to this and then I do what I do you shouldn't I wish Dr. Funkenstein gave me confidence to sing. I just don't have it. Again, if you listen to this and then I do what I do, you shouldn't, which is pull up the classic songs of Parliament or Funkadelic, which like, you know, Give Up the Funk or even Aqua Boogie.

Those remind you of like, oh, yeah, this is why they're legends and why everybody loves. And George Clinton and P-Funk were at a real resurgence in the 90s when this album was getting recorded yeah and like they're still around like parliament put out of an album not that many years ago like they're still out there p-funking to this day but yes this was around the time that i feel like especially when you know a lot of parliament stuff start finding its way into the hip-hop of the era like the the samples they got a big boost from that i was looking at what they were doing in the mid 90s like they were on lollapalooza they were way into the hip hop of the era, like the samples, they got a big boost from that. I was looking at what they were doing in the mid nineties. Like they were on Lollapalooza.

They were at Woodstock 99. Within a year of recording this, I think is when George Clinton and P-Funk would have been filming PCU. That classic. God, they're having a good time, but coming out swinging, it's basically Lisa is invited to a jam, but her voice, again, pitched up rather strangely in this. I got my back up against the wall. I'm too mean to fall. I just lean. I'm coming out swinging. I'm coming out swinging I'm coming out swinging

I'm coming out swinging I'm coming out swinging And it goes on like that. I think my chief issue with Yardley Smith on this song, which she's really, you know, she's game. She's going hard on this thing. There is just a certain stank you have to put on your voice when you are doing serious funk hooks and singing. And as much as I like her, I don't think she has that stank gear to shift into. You know what I mean? The way she's laughing, like, oh, I don't know.

I think they put a little of that tension in the song. Like they're at least putting it in there. But she just never really gets it there is the thing. I think that's where it kind of loses it for me. That and also the fact that it's six and a half minutes long. Yes. I don't know if I'm being unfair, but I think if you're named Yardley, you're relatively stank free. Yeah.

I prefer her covering a blues stand than this. Yeah. I do have a little clip here just that i do think there's some fun chemistry between yardley and george clinton sure that made me laugh. Get your union card, girl. We're going on the road. That's fun.

George Clinton, even on a bad day, he has charisma for days. He has riz for days, as the kids say. And I think it does sound like Yardley's having a lot of fun in that vocal booth. Whether there is perhaps some hot boxing going on there or not, I don't know. But she seems like she is leaning into it. Yeah, I like that she's having a good time. But I'm seven songs into this album. My arms are crossed.

I want to hear Lisa say, this is the most fun I've ever had in my life. I think, is this album mocking me? It's so long. Now, you've already heard some very long songs. And now you're hearing funk take a very long time to get funky. So we're out of funktown though the funk has left this is the chip monkey song on this record i swear to god definitely yeah this song man it might be the worst i don't know maybe it's the worst i just

hate bart and lisa having like a brother and sister hate song like sibling rivalry is at least like wants to be like a musical and cheesy and this is it's the chipettes like this is alvin singing against bridget i forget the name britney britney no i think you're right it's britney maybe i was going insane but i have a note here that says could this be reworked into a meatloaf song it sounds a bit meatloafy to me listeners at home weigh in please well actually when we mentioned chipmunks the co-writer of to a meatloaf song? It sounds a bit meatloafy to me. Listeners at home, weigh in, please. Well, actually, when we mentioned Chipmunks, the co-writer of this song and executive producer of this album, John Boylan, he came off of Chipmunks.

That's why he got hired to do the first Simpsons Sing the Blues and this one. So this being Chipmunky is not surprising. Though the other writer of the song, there's two credited writers on this. It's him and Lisa Angel. And when I looked her up, she's interesting. She's one of those, like, had a couple of near hits in the 90s, a would-be pop country star.

She co-wrote one of her biggest songs that she wrote was Winona Judd's I Saw the Light, which is not that big a song. But in my camp enjoyment of her was that she sang the theme song to the 1990 Beauty and the Beast Ron Perlman show called The First Time I Loved Forever. Oh, I know that song because I watched a weirdly high amount of that show for being like 10 years old when it came out. I looked it up and it's like basically Ron Perlman is talking about like, and I never met a woman this beautiful before. Yeah. She loved me. And then she starts singing and, you know, a kind of ballady.

This is a ballady-ish song. So that fits in her range. Yeah. But of course, this sounds horrible. You know you're too much to take. You're completely deranged. I'd sell you for a dime and give nine cents change I wouldn't take any money, that's a losing bet

I'd trade you in for anyone I could get Anything I could get Anytime I could get it Anywhere I could get it Anyone else in the world I'd rather have than you Anyone else in the whole wide world Would do Somebody who'd be a friend in need

Somebody who would care about me Anyone else in the whole wide world Oh, it's excruciating. Again, Meatloaf. Apply Meatloaf to this. It's got a real 80s musical vibe to it, at least to my ears. Oh, yeah. To be truly Meatloaf-y, it would have to be like 13 minutes long, and I'm very grateful that it is not. But yeah, this feels like the entire track just

got sped up like it's not just the vocals like everything about this feels like about you know 10 to 20 beats per minute too fast and that is what is just pitching everything up someone fell asleep on the mixing board yeah they'd some things up i do think the last three sound the worst yeah from that regard yeah especially lisa but especially bart this is the one where bart sounds the worst i could say in other ones like well nancy doesn't sound so bad even if yardley does but on this bart sounds as pitched up as lisa even more so me yeah way more so and yeah like this is you're right bob this is straight up chipmunk stuff it feels as lazy and as haphazard as any chipmunks like you know album recording and the lyrics are in by a

person who was just told these are two characters that are brand new and it's a brother and sister that don't like each other yeah okay there's no background here i'd at least say hey if you're gonna be lazy steal jokes from the show and make those lines in it instead like one of the earliest lines is lisa saying like what's happening under that spiky hair of yours? Like Lisa would never say that. That is the one that almost sounds sexual to me. Yeah. It just sounds like the songwriter was given a picture of the characters

and that's all they had to go on. Like, oh, I guess spiky hair should work its way into this. Maybe some of the pearls and the red dress. Any sibling song, this could be used in any context. Okay. So now it's time to get to a song that also could be sung by any couple. I at least feel like Dan and Julie on Every Summer With You, their chemistry transcends it's ever so slightly the crappy hole they're in, in this bad song.

Yeah. This is essentially this album's version of I Love To See You Smile. Just a fun duet between them. Again, the pitching is a huge problem. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas strip excitement MGM is famous for

when you play classics like MGM Grand Millions or popular games like Blackjack, Baccarat, and Roulette. With our ever-growing library of digital slot games, a large selection of online table games and signature BetMGM service, there is no better way to bring the excitement and ambiance of Las Vegas home to you than with BetMGM Casino. Download the BetMGM Casino app today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. BetMGM.com for T's and C's. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor

free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero hub has all you need to know

about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier and your world brighter. and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie. Dan sounds like Abe Simpson, but it seems like they're allowed to have a little fun towards the end with a tiny bit of improv,

some authentic laughing from Julie. It brings some life to this dead-eyed album. Yes, the co-writer on this with boyland is a man named jerry beckley who is a founding member of the band america which is a horse with no name that's the band he'd gone solo by 1990 he was fresh off of writing music and appearing in the john waters film cry baby why couldn't they just get another did they run out of money in the budget to afford just another duet off the shelf for them to cover? Instead, they just wrote a new one? I don't know. I mean, it's like, I can understand them wanting to have some kind of

like original ballad on here for them to sing, but it's just, this is another song where it feels like it just has nothing to add to either of these characters. It doesn't even really riff on anything that meaningful from the show. Let's hear a little bit of Julie really sounding off, especially in this. Don't have a cabin in the Poconos. Don't have a place at the beach. I'd love to shuffle off to Buffalo. It's just a little out of our reach

But I don't need a holiday As long as you're here with me Winter's gone, it's spring again One thing I know is true All my life I want to spend Every summer with you Every summer with you Hey, homie, I got an idea.

What do you think about this? Atlantic City by the Shiny Sea. Yeah, it's just a little too far away. All right. The intense speeding up and or pitching up, it makes me think someone thought Julie was terrible. And I think a lot of the charm of hearing Marge sing is just how bad it is. Yeah.

She's going for it, and it's a character voice you would never assume would sing to you. Yeah, and that's the thing, is that, like, that's the joke. And, you know, when you put her on a song like this, the idea would be to lean into that joke. But here it feels like they're trying to mask it, like you said, and that's such a bad approach. And she is pitched up so high, which really comes out of the Every Summer with you chorus when they're singing together because it feels like they can't harmonize at all yeah like look i'm not a great musician by any stretch and i don't have a lot of hard rules about how you write a song or how you you know track a song but one rule i've always adhered to is your instrumentation should never sound like the

karaoke version of the song you are writing and And that is what this cheap-ass keyboard and this really bargain-basement little drum sample sound like to me. I wrote down, it reminds me of a Tim and Eric song that they would be using. It's someone hitting the demo button on a keyboard you pulled off the shelf at Kmart. Yeah, like someone said,

pretend to do Randy Newman for a couple of minutes, and that's just what someone farted out. Also, there's no specifics. This also could feel like if they told me the plot of this song is this is Marge and Homer singing it when they were young before they had kids maybe then it would work. Also the pitching up would make a little more sense but no they don't mention like oh but then the darn kids are gonna have to to come along, which is an easy joke. Just do that. Like the only time this feels slightly alive is the last 30 seconds of padding where Dan is just improvising in Homer, which he can do. OK, if you give him the chance. And he has just the easy joke of like, OK, here's where we're going to go.

We're going to have stopped eat here and stopped eat here and stopped eat here. And then it sounds like Julie just like legitimately laughs like that. and we get a timely reference to the springfield mystery spot which was in homer at the bet it feels like a specific only dan brought in from remembering it from the show everything referenced is production season three on this album everything yeah and that's what's so fun on the cover as well by the way that just everybody they're standing with it's their season three designs like it's that's what morrison's using so you're not seeing any character that appeared after 1992 on the cover i also always love when dan and julie she did this when she acted with albert brooks as a voice on the show too they would say now do you know what this is and she's

like no what like she's see she has very simple improv props and that's the same here we're like hey marge you know what we should do know what homer well we should she's a game partner but doesn't have a ton no so all right after all of that we're finally finally at the end of this album with one we've covered before though this is our in-depth look at it yes it's a worse version of a song you liked over six years ago a worse and longer version although it is harry shearer's sole appearance on the album which made me think he would have not been on the entire album like how did they do it where did they pull the gun out and point it at him and make him do this yes there had to be some tiny clause in

his contract that he harshly renegotiated after this, I feel. And here's my question. My last pitch up comment is, I understand pitching up the characters when they're singing. Why is Krusty pitched up when he's just talking? It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't sound like Krusty. It drives me crazy. Yes, that feels like just an effect was added to the full track with no care about where they placed it on it. They held to the Camp Krusty extended version, which does have writing credits for Algie and Mike Reese and Jay Kogan, though based on what Jay Kogan told me of not remembering it at all, makes me think that that's just the formality of using the lyrics

for the show that they wrote. And again, a lot of it is recapping an episode you have watched 100 times, although I do like Martin's perspective. I did enjoy his verse. It was the one exactly from the episode. And then it's time to rock out first with Harry Shearer. I have hit the air, yeah. Hail to the camp crusty and the transportation dude. I get the same feeling hearing that verse as I feel when I hear Murray Head's song from Chess one night in Bangkok. It's that same sort of like extremely theater kid guitar distortion kind of rock. You know what I mean? Was that lick like stolen or a reference like...

Oh yeah, that is a riff. For some reason, the song is escaping me at this moment, but that is absolutely stolen from something else. And right before this album was produced, or maybe during the time it was produced, that's when the second Spinal Tap album came out, which I'm sure Harry sang a lot on. God, that's a great point, Bob, that Harry Shearer,

I have complained that he is maybe a bit too snobbish towards The Simpsons, but to be a member of Spinal Tap, like the most celebrated comedy rock groups ever, and then asked to do this, like he should have the bile rising past his throat when being asked to do this. And he's having to sing as Otto, a voice we know he hates doing spoken he's screaming like wow like he screams at the start of his section why does he

hate no auto i think it's just rough on his voice it's the same reason why dr marvin monroe was uh killed off ah kind of too brutal on the throat too harsh yeah and also the writers had used all of their auto material by the end of season three so they phased him out and made him sort of a one-note joke character that wasn't going to carry episode plots. Gotcha. Also, I think that riff is the riff from Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. Ah, okay. Man, I feel like, let's get the Hendrix estate on a lawsuit here. They love to sue, so they could probably pull it off.

Yeah. Actually, yes, Alex, you have personal experience with not just the mixing of tracks, but also of the licensing of songs as well. Yeah, it was my time working at Harmonix on the Rock Band games. I wasn't on the audio team, so I didn't do any of that stuff directly, but I heard a lot of stories about the things that went into that stuff. And one of the things I heard was that the hendrix estate legendarily a pain in the ass to work with did prince songs get it on those games because he also was very

reserved yeah never happened in any of them i know there were pitches made to him while he was still alive and i think it was a pretty blanket turned down not even like i want more money more of a i don't want to do this i was gonna say while we're on the subject of harry shearer we're going to be able to see if he can rock out at age 80 in Spinal Tap 2, coming soon. Is that in production now? Apparently it started filming in March of this year. Okay. So we can't stop it from happening.

Oh, man. You know, but why does Rob Reiner have to direct it? If a man in his 60s were directing it, I feel like I'd have a little more faith in this return. Just have the judd apatow machine directed like why must it be rob reiner at a very old age in the song to get back to this terrible expansion of a funny song honestly in the show wasn't even that funny either so otto has his little lyric and then for the final time on the album they throw it to lisa again which says she sings a little bit and then

another sax solo to pad it out. Pad it out. But Lisa is even like, oh, well, at least they let me have my sax, which is not accurate to the show. Though Otto was their bus driver to Camp Krusty. So I'll give him credit. That is accurate.

Then the other clip I do have is I like, like is a strong word, but I like hearing Martin get to sing in it. They fed me gruel and stuff that looks like bait And a pox on thee, Clown Krusty Your behavior gives us pause Your heart is hard You have no regard for the state's child labor laws A pox on thee, Camp Krusty We are yearning to be free

We will ne'er return to Krusty Ah, put a lid on it, Martin Let's rock this camp! I hate it! Can't trust it! Can't stand it! Can't trust it! Let's burn it!

Can't trust it! Truly incredible. I do have to give it up to... Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, truly incredible that the one that is essentially a medley of multiple genres still manages to be shorter than like two or three of the other songs on this record. Like I said earlier, I do like the Martin verse.

It's funny. It's a recap of something I enjoyed. And Rosie Taylor is great at singing in character voices. She had done a ton of singing as Minnie Mouse at this point in history. So doing Martin must have been so easy for her. I was thinking of how many times she had to sing songs on Muppet Babies as Gonzo, as Baby Gonzo.

Oh, God. That is such a harder voice than Martin. And she sang those like, yeah. I'm also just happy they actually got, like, Lucy Taylor got the money for this. Like, she got to do it. And it is a good little song and you get to have the fun of bart interrupts it to be like enough of this loser

it is very poochy way yeah i will say that maybe the single best production choice they make anywhere on this album is changing the keyboard sound to harpsichord when it goes for martin's verse it is the right musical choice and maybe the only right musical choice they make anywhere on the record and it's martin recapping how he was at the fat camp with good lines and like in a pox on the clown crusty that's clever lyrics unlike a lot of lyrics whoever wrote that understood martin and where he's coming from i want to think that's a jeff martin is he is credited sorry sax solo well now i gotta keep it in that's funny okay but i wonder if those bits

were jeff martin because he is credited for like additional lyrics on here like additional lyrics and dialogue john boylan and jeff martin so maybe like that or the Krusty bit was him though based on my questions to him he wanted to bury all memories of working on the yellow album though I also think another mistake they had on this is that if they're gonna have a medley in a mix of styles why doesn't this end with Krusty singing a mariachi style song some sort of Mexican music style song to indicate the trip to tijuana at the end of the original episode yeah i think this song they just fade it down in the mix to end it yes which i i'm stealing this from when nathan rabin reviewed this for my world of flops but to end

your album with just a minute of somebody repeating how much they hate hate hate something it's a gutsy move of extreme negativity at the end of your poor album yeah i don't even think we get the lyric a registered trademark of the crusty corporation all rights reserved we don't even get that do we is it in there they cut it off with auto's rock out moment cuts it off okay man that would have been a funny end to it too. But instead, you just fade out on Bart repeating every possible way he can say he does not like Camp Krusty. It's garbage.

I hate it. Yeah. I mean, look, everything you are describing here that would make this song better would require the people involved in this to be way more invested in making something good than clearly anyone here was. And like, you know, whatever you want to say about simpsons saying the blues some effort went into that thing maybe not in all the places it should have but it had some

energy behind it some genuine thought behind it whether it's all good or not but this it just feels like no one is even bothering to sit down and try and make those kinds of connections to the show or what's happening. It's just trying to fill minutes with sound. That's it. From what I can glean from the Simpsons writers when I asked them, I get the feeling they had some youthful energy on Sings the Blues and were trying to get some extra shine on it. Just because, well, my name's on this album i should work hard on it by the time they were working on this they were all dead tired and waiting for their contracts to end in season four to move on to a better paying job with the less late nights

so i can see why if they heard about the yellow album they're like why would i work harder on this thing right i hate working hard on the show I like, The Simpsons. Yeah, and I guess with that original album, they're riding the wave of the phenomenon. There was still so much excitement. Not that they were that demoralized, but the show had become an institution that was going to continue. With Sing the Blues, it was a huge fad, and they were trying to capitalize on it, and they were so excited by seeing everybody celebrating the show all at once in 1990. I wish everybody else on this put in the effort that Bill Morrison did.

And the liner notes, too, on the back, he drew multiple things for it that are a lot of fun parodies of Sgt. Pepper, which is just too bad that almost all the songs don't have that level. None of the songs have that level of quality. Why am I being nice? Just make it shorter. Like, it's not, you won't get sued if you had a 38-minute kids album that ripped off kids by being short. Like, nobody would care.

Like, tighten this up at least. Yeah, I mean, just every choice they make just feels like finished most of these recordings to eventually get out the door just screams of nobody wanted to take ownership of this thing nobody wanted it to be their project and just eventually it just somehow slid out there to zero fanfare i guess my last thought on this is it would have been interesting as a footnote of did you know there was a sequel album to simpsons sing the blues but it was never released they fully produced it and recorded and some bootlegs leaked out there but they never released it instead of being a mystery it instead became a reality you could listen to and maybe they also well they ended up being lucky in that whatever they sold of this would have been the last time they even could sell albums because like it's 1998 napster's right around the corner no one would pay for these ever again an album like this so whatever money that

fox and geffen made off of this was the last time they were going to make any money on it do we know how many copies this actually sold i could not find any you know on the wikis usually they list album sales they were not on the wiki i I could not find the RAA listing for it. I'm going to Google it one more time here while we were chatting, but I could not find it. I'd hazard to guess that's because it did not clear some kind of threshold where anyone would have actually taken note of how many copies it sold. No, I cannot find it. I bet you're right. Then that would put it under like the 60,000 that other ones got sold.

Yeah. So that's pretty brutal. Though I did find a listing. It sold for $3,000 at auction. A promotional poster version of the cover for the Yellow Album. 20th Century Fox is proud to present the exclusive hand-painted limited edition cell entitled The Yellow Album. This is like the sales pattern for it when it came out in 98 it's crazy they actually sent out a promotional thing for it now worth at least three thousand dollars dang i guess my final thoughts are our lives are all worse for having learned about this but as a simpsons podcaster it's my duty to do so and i'm proud to do my duty

i'm very happy to have at least scratched the itch of, I want answers. I found whatever answers I could find out there. And thank you to all of the people who very nicely replied to me, who I asked, do you know anything about the album? Most of which the answers were no. Who told you about this?

Well, Alex, thank you for being on the show. And also we're sorry, but please let us know more about where we can find you online and more about Nextlander. Never apologize. I love talking about bad pop culture ephemera, especially ephemera attached to things I actually love, like The Simpsons. So this was, hey, this is filling a gap for me. I now can say I've heard all The Simpsons novelty songs. You can etch that on my tombstone if you want to.

So as far as where i'm at i am part of a trio known as next lander we do streams we do podcasts mostly about video games but also about other things too you can find us at nextlander.com or patreon.com slash next lander i'm on twitter alex underscore navarro with two r's just like dave navarro if you need that reference i'm also on blue sky and other places but that's pretty much it. I'm online. You can find me. You guys at NextLander are very productive. You're streaming all the time.

You do tons of exclusives for your patrons as well. You got a real healthy Patreon. We had you right after the launch of NextLander last time. You guys were straight to the moon from the minute you went. It's been a wild time. I am endlessly grateful that people continue to support us on Patreon,

just like they do you folks. Whatever you might think of patreon as a company it's a great way for people to support the creators they like and i'm happy we could sync up like this now it's next time we'll give you a good episode yes thank you you've suffered enough that would be great again i enjoy talking about stuff that is terrible but i do also occasionally like speaking about the things i love too so that'd be great thanks again to alex navarro for being on the show please check out next lander and everything he's doing over there but ask for us if you want to support the show and get a ton of bonus episodes in ad-free podcasts head on over to patreon.com slash talking simpsons when you sign up you'll get early access to ad-free podcasts as well as nearly 200 full-length

miniseries episodes about things like Futurama, King of the Hill, Mission Hill, Batman the Animated Series, and The Critic and that five bucks a month also gets you regular access to new episodes of Talking Futurama and Talking of the Hill and the second you sign up you get access to everything we've made behind that paywall for the past seven plus years. It's a great deal for five bucks a month at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. And there's a $10 level too. When you sign up for that, you get all the $5 stuff naturally, but then you also get one super long podcast once a month, only for patrons of that level or higher.

And what is that, Henry? Bob's talking about our What a Cartoon movie podcast, our premium podcast each month where for 10 bucks a month, you get to hear us talk about an animated feature film, super in-depth as we would do a bad simpsons album and that means talking for almost four five or six hours about animated feature films it's more like we're doing a triple podcast at the end of the month this month you're going to hear us talk about 1999's tarzan from disney the month before that we did pocahont, the 1995 Disney film, as we wrap up our summer of Disney Renaissance. If you want to hear all the previous Disney Renaissance movies, plus it's talking about tons of Pixar films, tons of Studio Ghibli films, Space Jam, which I accidentally mentioned earlier in the episode.

So many great things. That is right there we've almost done six years of what a cartoon movies in addition to all of the ad-free premium and early podcasts that you get at patreon.com slash talking simpsons including our longest one ever where we covered who framed roger abbott for over six and a half hours all of that is at your fingertips when you become a member at patreon.com slash talking simpsons. And I have been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo.

My other podcast, by the way, is Retronauts. That's a classic gaming podcast all about old video games. You can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month. And Henry, how about you? If you're following Bob on Twitter,

be sure to follow me and all the social media places at H-E-N-E-R-E- episodes every month. And Henry, how about you? If you're following Bob on Twitter, be sure to follow me and all the social media places at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I'm always posting it up on the post box. And if you're following me and Bob on those social medias, follow at TalkSimpsonsPod because at TalkSimpsonsPod

is the official account on all of those social media sites for this podcast. Whenever new podcasts go up for either Simpsons or What a Cartoon or any of our Patreon bonuses, you're going to see it posted about by at TalkSimpsonsPod. And if you want an easy-to-explore list of all of our previously released free episodes and podcasts,

head over to TalkingSimpsons.com. Thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll see you again next time for the latest episode of our community podcast, Talk to the Audience, and we'll see you then. The End Thou shalt have the book. Which brings us on to commandment number three. Thou shalt question authority. Because authority hates curiosity.

Which leads straight to originality. From there, my friends, to spontaneity. And the downward spiral straight to mockery. Then a hop and a skip to mutiny. Then mutiny leads to anarchy. And... Cut! Knock it off.

You have worked so hard to make your business into a reality, but achieving your next business goal, that can be overwhelming. What if you had someone to talk through the options and the next steps with? Someone who wants to see your business succeed while giving you peace of mind. That's why the bankers at Merchants Bank are here, ready with exceptional service every step of the way. Let's dream together. Visit merchantsbank.com to get started.

Merchants Bank is a proud member of FDIC.