Monday, April 14 through Friday, April 18 is WYEP’s Decades Week. On Monday, all the music played from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. will be from 1975. On Tuesday, it’s all 1985. 1995 takes center stage on Wednesday. Relive 2005’s best music on Thursday. And wrap up the week with a journey back to 2015.
Let’s preview some of the songs that will be heard on WYEP on Wednesday, April 16, from 1995.
Natalie Merchant started off her solo career with bang, spawning three hit songs from her first post-10,000 Maniacs album, Tiger Lily.
The Scottish group Del Amitri racked up the biggest hit of their U.S. career with “Roll To Me,” climbing to #10 (making them a 2-hit wonder, since their song "Kiss This Thing Goodbye" barely cracked the top 40 in 1990).
MN rockers Soul Asylum also joined the 2-hit wonder club when “Misery” hit #20 in July of 1995 (“Runaway Train” was their other hit).
And Dionne Farris, who had already tasted success singing with Arrested Development, did it as a solo artist in 1995. She had released her solo debut album Wild Seed – Wild Flower in late ’94, and the single “I Know” peaked at #4 on the pop chart in May 1995.
One song that’s very hard to shake from its time period is “I'll Be There For You” by the Los Angeles duo The Rembrandts. Used as the theme for the TV sitcom Friends starting in the fall of ’94, an expanded version of the song perked up to #17 on the pop chart in the fall of 1995. (In what seems to be rampant looking back at 1995, The Rembrandts were also a 2-hit wonder, having also scored a top 40 hit in 1990 with “That’s Just the Way It Is, Baby.”)
Another soundtrack song that seems frozen in 1995 is U2’s contribution to the Batman Forever film. “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” was released as a single in June of that year and then made it to #16 on the pop chart two months later.
And why would we be playing New Order’s 1986 classic “Bizarre Love Triangle” in a day devoted to 1995? Well, the Australian band Frente released an acoustic cover version of the song which got a lot of attention and radio airplay in mid-1994. New Order's original had a subsequent flurry of interest and bubbled up into the pop chart for the first time in the U.S. nearly a decade after its release; it peaked at #98 in July of 1995.
Another quirk of music history was “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam. Originally from the Ten album in 1991, the song was never issued as a commercial single at that time, despite it becoming a huge song thanks to its music video and radio airplay. The song was finally released as an official single in 1995, after which it peaked at #79 on the pop chart in August 1995.
