And so our journey through the ‘teens’ comes to its inevitable conclusion with a combination of the last teen and the first twenty. Tomoorow will see the final post in this sereis of individual numbers, although there might be a couple of posts of honourable mentions. I have chosen to combine 19 and 20 because I wanted to collect only those songs which I considered worth the research.
“19th Nervous Breakdown” is a song recorded by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it was recorded in late 1965 and released as a single in February 1966. It reached number 2 on both the US Billboard and and in the UK, while topping the charts compiled by Cash Box and NME. In the UK, it broke the band’s streak of consecutive number-one singles that had started with “It’s All Over Now”(1964).
“Hey Nineteen” is a song by the band Steely Dan from their album Gaucho (1980). According to one reviewer’s interpretation, the song “was about a middle-aged man’s disappointment with a young lover” “Hey Nineteen” peaked at number 10 on the Billboard chart in early 1981, number 11 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and number 68 on the R&B Singles chart. With a chart run of 19 weeks, it is tied with two other of their songs for their longest charting hit.
“19” is a song by British musician Paul Hardcastle released as the first single from his self-titled fourth studio album (1985). The song has a strong anti-war message, focusing on the Vietnam War and the effect it had on the soldiers who served. The track was notable for early use of sampled and processed speech, in particular a synthesized stutter effect used on the words ‘nineteen’ and ‘destruction’. It also includes various non-speech, re-dubbed sampling, such as crowd noise and a military bugle call. “19” had huge international success in the charts; it went to No. 1 in the UK for five weeks, as well as a number of other countries worldwide. “19” became the top-selling single in 13 countries for 1985.
“Twenty Years” is a song by English band Placebo, included on their 2004 best-of compilation release Once More With Feeling:Singles 1996-2004. It was the only entirely new song to be released as a single (although “Protege-Moi”, a French-language re-recording of an earlier song, was released in France). In the UK, it peaked at number 18 in the UK.
Twenty is the title track from the album by Robert Cray. It was released in May 2005, through Sanctuary Records. Cray says “‘Twenty’ is the way I feel about the move into Iraq instead of going after Osama Bin Laden,” he says. “In the song, a young man joins the service after 9/11, questions the whole thing and winds up not coming home. Somebody was duped.”
Sonnet 20 is one of the best-known sonnet written by William Shakespeare. Part of the Fair Youth sequence, the subject of the sonnet is widely interpreted as being male, thereby raising questions about the sexuality of the author. In this sonnet the beloved’s beauty is compared to both a man’s and a woman’s. All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu is the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, first released in Canada through Decca Records in March 2010. Three of the songs on the album are adaptations of Shakespeare’s sonnets—”10, 20 and 43″. Wainwright composed music for each of the sonnets.
