Obscure Singles Heard at CVS

I like Afterburner but yeah outside of "why am I hearing Sleeping Bag at CVS?" insanity I don't know why anything from it would make regular rotation on rock radio now

― da croupier, Thursday, October 11, 2012 2:32 PM

I tweeted this a few days ago. Recently:

Duran Duran - Do You Believe in Shame
Michael Penn - This and That

Semisonic: All About Chemistry

Grocery store, not CVS, but "Echo Beach" by Martha and the Muffins.

Not a CVS but I recently heard "I Am The Slime" by Zappa when I was getting my hair cut

once heard the entirety of they might be giants' flood on the walmart radio station.

jesus buddy were you waiting for an oil change or something?

ie it wasn't some worker blasting flood thru the store pa, it was the corporate radio station piped into walmarts coast to coast for some reason doing a 'showcase' on flood.

haha i think (dear god i hope) it started soon after i arrived and i may have indeed lingered to take it in, hear 'twisting' for the first time in however many years, take half an hour to decide whether or not i want poptarts, etc. something very fucked about hearing this blasting at walmart though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zNoxjUUyec

hahaha that's better than what I was guessing, which was "Your Racist Friend"

I heard Cracker's cover of "Shake Some Action" in CVS just two nights ago.

Others:

Boz Scaggs - Miss Sun
a-ha - The Sun Always Shines on TV
Tyler Collins - Girls Night Out
Toni Childs - Don't Walk Away

Huh I heard echo beach at Barnes & noble last week.

weirdest one i remember was "change your mind" by neil young while i was standing in line to get painkillers a few years ago. must've been a radio edit. felt appropriate.

Michael Penn - This and That
also, this song is so classic

Heard "Let's Hang On" which was a minor Top 40 for Barry Manilow at a Rite Aid once.

Sunrise by Duran Duran at Papa Ginos a month or so ago.
Why would THAT happen?

lite rock cover of Catch the Sun by Doves @ my bank

"Heaven's on Fire" by KISS was playing on at least two separate occasions at the CVS by my college

not an obscure single really but jarring in the soft-rock context, heard "More Bounce to the Ounce" at the local grocery store a few months ago

REM - "All The Way To Reno"

ie it wasn't some worker blasting flood thru the store pa, it was the corporate radio station piped into walmarts coast to coast for some reason doing a 'showcase' on flood.

― balls, Thursday, October 11, 2012 5:25 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That is exceptionally weird and now I want to listen to that album which I haven't done in years.

It's not obscure but I was euphoric when I heard Amy Grant's "I Will Remember You" yesterday.

was picking up prescription for antidepressant at walgreens and they were playing "i wanna be sedated." no lie.

heard velvet underground - oh! sweet nuthin' at walgreens last week

Sugar Ray's "Chasin You Around" at Met Foods. The second single off In Pursuit Of Leisure, the album after the last one anyone cared about

not obscure but heard like a 10-minute Tool deep cut in a 24 hour kroger once. it was weird because there was usually just soft rock & r&b playing there

a couple visits to shop rite ago i heard the 12-inch edit of "she's always in my hair"

I'm just gonna use this thread for obscure songs heard in any retail setting:

Roxy Music - 2HB in Noodles and Company yesterday.

The other week in Morrisons they were playing 'If I Could Talk I'd Tell You' by the Lemonheads (a #39 smash in 1996).

Heard the Kinks' "Juke Box Music" in a grocery store a couple of years ago. Barely a hit in the US in 1977, never played on "classic rock" radio.

lol i heard donna lewis's flop second single "without love" in a cvs once

Heard "For What It's Worth" by The Cardigans in the grocery store the other day.

not that obscure really but heard dennis deyoung's "desert moon" followed by madonna's "this used to be my playground" on KRGR kroger radio last night, the algorithm was feeling some super intense nostalgia apparently

Thought this was a revival of this thread: albert hammond, "it never rains in southern california"

Not obscure, but I really enjoyed hearing Scritti Politti at CVS yesterday.

I heard the song 'On the Beach' by Neil Young at the grocery store once.

Heard "Couple Days Off" by Huey Lewis & The News last night at Whataburger.

Heard "Emerge" Fischerspooner at a Florida water-park

https://soundcloud.com/hennessyyoungman/cvsbangers

haha thank you, a classic

Jack In The Box is good for these. Today it was "Wild Wild Life" by Talking Heads, and last time a couple weeks ago I heard "Canary In A Coalmine" by The Police.

It's not obscure but I was euphoric when I heard Amy Grant's "I Will Remember You" yesterday.

alfred i'd start straight up bawling

I heard that really sterile, generic, terrible ballad by "Sergio Mendes" from the 80s...."Never Gonna Let You Go"...in a Zaxby's.

whenever i'm in cvs i hear "shattered dreams"

I heard Jack Wagner's "All I Need" and Richard Marx's "Hazard" once in an Albertsons during a 4 hour shift. I remain convinced that they had not changed their Muzak since my childhood.

and whenever I hit the "from this empty heart" falsetto several mothers in the cold medicine section scowl

hahaha. I can't help not singing along to that tune either. that or "All I Need is a Miracle".

haha otm

Shopping for pencils and invisible tape at CVS this morning I heard "Soul Drifter" by Lindsey Buckingham!

^^^^ I've heard it at CVS too

Manu Dibango - "Soul Makossa," in H.E.B. yesterday (though for some reason, in that store, the only place you can usually hear the music without straining your ears is in the restroom)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps in the men's room at the Houston Intercontinental Airport, guitar solo while taking the piss

Arcadia's "Goodbye is Forever" right now at this Starbucks.

Came here to say it was nice hearing Bananarama's "The Wild Life" at Starbucks this morning, which for the first half-minute I thought was Roxette before recalling it. Looks like they're honing in on mid-80s obscure follow-up singles.

not obscure but hearing al green's "here i am (come and take me)" at a flying j fuel pump in the middle of nowhere two weekends ago was awesome and surreal.

...and sexy

worlds hottest flying j

not super obscure but just heard 'Astral Weeks' (the song) at Trader Joe's, not really a single as it's seven minutes long

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps in the men's room

we have crosswalk buttons that say 'Wait!' when you push the button, and I invariably reply with 'they don't love you like I love you'

lol I'm gonna have to exert an effort to not start doing that

Local pub for wings, one 45-minute window: "Cinnamon Girl," "Highway Star," "Maggie May," "No Time," "Reelin' in the Years." It's almost like I'm a type, a cliche, and someone's pushing all my buttons.

Modest Mouse’s “Dashboard” at my Starbucks.

A few years ago now but heard Tina Turner's "Look Me in the Heart" for the first time at a bookstore in Vietnam, of all places. Beautiful song

CVS

George Jackson: "Aretha, Sing One For Me"

The Animals - Monterey, in Hy-Vee

https://bsky.app/profile/nedraggett.bsky.social/post/3motjkx7vas2q

First Watch:

Mudcrutch: "Trailer"

venus- shocking blue, at prost

not so obscure— i mean fucking bananarama covered it, now justly even more obscure (though i do enjoy cruel summer in a way). but shocking blue was ripping trends at the time just right imo.

alone again or — love.
at torchys tacos

on the one hand it’s def in their boomer/x algo i should think. damned’s versh would be more whoa. nevertheless.

Wham Bam Shang-A-Lang by Silver in a Mexican restaurant yesterday. Their only charting hit, from 1976. Keyboardist Brent Mydland went on to The Grateful Dead but you maybe knew that.

Actually the whole time I was there the playlist was 70s stuff from Little River Band, Kenny Loggins etc.

huh i dint have any clue where mydland came from—while dissing the dead to my deadhead friends, who were mostly great fun and friends in many other respects.

that was 86-99 fwiw the internet wouldnt tell me jackshit

Berry white - Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe

Barry White rather

there is some cover version of the doves "catch the sun" that has caught my ire for the last year or so - moreso because the original was perfect for this.

annie lennox - little bird, in meijer. not top 40 in the us, but i def remember the video. mtv play skews what is obscure or not.

From my sister:

ELO: "Ma-Ma Belle" at Kroger

Daryl Hall's last solo top 40 single, "Foolish Pride." Good song!

maybe not using the correct search terms but all the online articles i found re: hipster drugstore/ grocery playlists talked about age-related demographics for particular retail outlets vis-à-vis nostalgia and whatnot, how tempo moves traffic, and lower licensing costs of lesser-known hits. nothing specifically addressed the pachyderm in the chamber, why do these services seeming employ music nerds to signal to other music nerds? what's the return on that? i don't know what anyone else is familiar with but hearing something even as iconic as atmosphere in a kroger in rust-belt sw ohio is an unnerving experience. i know what that is but why did they assume i'd know what that is? is it because of reasons or because there are no reasons, whoever gets to do this just gets to play what they like and whatever, no one cares if gary and kelly ellison from brookville who are buying potato salad for the church picnic know or like what they're hearing?

pretty much the same question as the op: i don't mind that i'm hearing this, but why am i hearing this, here? it's not like radio is playing any of this, for the statistically significant most part.

Something like Atmosphere more likely shows up because it was featured on Stranger Things, so it's a hip obscure song that is also familiar to younger people as well. It's part of this phenomenon of 80s nostalgia for things that weren't initially popular, but became so after the fact because they got used on a TV show or TikTok video.

you may be right- b joel at king soopers (kroger in co)

Coffee shop, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes." Sacrilege, I know, but low enough that I'm not sure if it's Fairport Convention or Judy Collins--I think the latter.

(Followed by Nick Drake, so maybe it was Fairport.)

Dan Fogelberg's "Missing You" at Walgreens.

Killing time in Toronto to avoid traffic, I ate at a restaurant I started going to pre-COVID when I still lived there, Wally's Grill. The music was incredible...a couple of garage songs ("Hey Little Girl," "Can't Get Enough of You Baby"), Dick & Dee Dee's "The Mountain's High," the Casinos' "Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye," the Impressions' "Woman's Got Soul," a girl-group song I didn't recognize, and another garagey Beach Boys thing I vaguely recognized but couldn't name. Best of all was a sequence of Frankie Lymon's "The ABC's of Love," Johnnie & Joe's "Over the Mountain," the Chantels' "I Love You So," and Johnny Ace's "Pledging My Love." I thought I'd wandered into a Scorsese film...maybe it was his restaurant, acquired on a trip to Toronto in a manner similar to Paulie taking over the restaurant in Goodfellas.

I asked the waitress if I was hearing a CD, a playlist, satellite radio, or what. She said they had their own library of music--by which she possibly meant playlist--and that people come in during the day, order a coffee, and hang around for an hour because of the music. She said they herd them all into the back corner of the restaurant.

david gates' took the last train in kroger. so smooth, so smarmy. yacht-adjacent that is more yacht than yacht-by-definition. this is more evocative of late 70s socal yacht-life than effin' kenny loggins, imo.

Was in Zara recently, surprised to hear "The Missing Boy" Durutti Column

not that i'd know, but still. so many nyacht-designated songs that hit that sweet late-70s smooth spot more than officially consecrated "yacht rock" songs but there isn't an overarching term for that. magnet and steel only got a 37.25 rating on yacht or nyacht but it's one of the greatest smooth songs of the era. same with the dr hook catalog. sexy eyes, dammit, sharing the night together, impeccably smooth. not yacht, more yacht than yacht. calling this stuff nyacht or yacht-adjacent relegates awesome music to a lesser-than status. i'm on the wrong thread for this but what's the correct term for that late-70s smooth (centered around 78-79) music that includes yacht but is not centered or delineated by it? i'm getting all raymond carver over here but this is what we talk about when we talk about yacht.

I call it "late '70s pop music."

I'm not being snarky. I fucking hate "yacht rock" as any kind of descriptor. Useless.

Maybe this casts *too* wide a net, but radio-format-wise, you're describing "soft rock," maybe overlapping with what was called "Easy Listening" until 1979, and "Adult Contemporary" since then. I think the yacht purists are looking for a particular fusion of pop-rock song structure with jazz chords and chops. R&B, and/or Quiet Storm radio specifically, is intertwined with this nexus.

Sammy Hagar "I Can't Drive 55" in Ace Hardware, no idea if that's an obscure single in Minnesota or not

yah in 1981 i called it “that fuckin steely dan shit”

even then i knew it was inaccurate but it pissed off the right ppl

"glossy bop-pop," we all sniffed

i was 14 and dint know the joys of glossy bop pop. er — what were the joys? the pure colombian?

All the Cuervo Gold you can drink.

that's literally the vibe i referred to in one of the yacht threads, chardonnay and cocaine. disco-era hedonism in the age of bad vibes; striving to feel good in the age of malaise. i suppose smooth is an appropriate signifier. soft rock is too broad: a lot of soft is warm and open, sentimental. love is the answer. smooth is resigned, it's an unreliable narrator; it wants something, primarily to get laid and pass it off as some sort of resolution of contemporary existential crises. emotional depth and honesty is just a cover.

i always thought pure colombian was coke in the early 80s, but ai wants me to believe this was actually 80s referral to good weed. huh.

i meant 70s

yeah famously the Colombian is supposed to refer to weed, which, sure Jan