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| Have I mentioned Roberts painted all the album covers? |
The Hit
“…a few acoustic guitar strums and then pow, the musical gas is punched in the form of a single gunshot-styled snare drumbeat.”
“This revs things up instantly as the drumming intensifies and cocksure electric guitar riffs join in, followed by a set of gritty vocals that sound simultaneously guarded and vulnerable, all underscored by punctual synthesizer blips.”
Finding that description of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears “Driver’s Seat” on Vintage Rock spared me from trying to describe a song I still haven’t wrapped my head around. None of those adjectives - e.g., “gritty,” “guarded” and “vulnerable” - match what I hear in the song, but doing 91 of these posts has helped me appreciate the struggle of translating music into words.
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears landed a pretty damn big hit with “Driver’s Seat,” one big enough to lift the album it was on into the Top 40 on the Billboard (the single peaked at No. 15 on the singles chart), and it took them to a place or two…which, it bears noting, didn’t jive with expectations for some key members of the band. One, however, soldiered on, and for long enough to get some of those wayward members back into the fold. Circling back to Vintage Rock:
“Lyrically, the song is about picking yourself up after a breakup. Musically, it started as a riff; behind the riff was a revolving chord sequence. I abandoned the riff when I realized it was a bit similar to something else, but the acoustic pattern was unusual and led to a certain propulsive tension that suited the fragmented state of mind implied by the words.”
That’s Paul Roberts talking, who seems like exactly one of two people that you really need to pay attention to for this one…
The Rest of the Story
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears started in England’s pub rock scene, circa 1973, playing mostly night clubs. The band’s name came from Roberts - who had wrote a band named “The Tears” into “a dystopian novel” he’d “attempted" - and the band’s manager, who added the “Sniff” to the name as a nod to Roberts’ struggles with hay fever. They knocked around that scene for a year or two, gigging, even recording a dozen songs to shop as demos, but nothing took beyond some paying work. With what looked like nothing but deadends ahead, having a guitarist check out to join the military was all it took for that first line-up to disband. Roberts, for his part, relocated to France to “pursue his painting” according to a 2012 post on blog titled Riff Raf, a theory that, without confirmation, seems entirely reasonable in the grand scheme.
“…a few acoustic guitar strums and then pow, the musical gas is punched in the form of a single gunshot-styled snare drumbeat.”
“This revs things up instantly as the drumming intensifies and cocksure electric guitar riffs join in, followed by a set of gritty vocals that sound simultaneously guarded and vulnerable, all underscored by punctual synthesizer blips.”
Finding that description of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears “Driver’s Seat” on Vintage Rock spared me from trying to describe a song I still haven’t wrapped my head around. None of those adjectives - e.g., “gritty,” “guarded” and “vulnerable” - match what I hear in the song, but doing 91 of these posts has helped me appreciate the struggle of translating music into words.
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears landed a pretty damn big hit with “Driver’s Seat,” one big enough to lift the album it was on into the Top 40 on the Billboard (the single peaked at No. 15 on the singles chart), and it took them to a place or two…which, it bears noting, didn’t jive with expectations for some key members of the band. One, however, soldiered on, and for long enough to get some of those wayward members back into the fold. Circling back to Vintage Rock:
“Lyrically, the song is about picking yourself up after a breakup. Musically, it started as a riff; behind the riff was a revolving chord sequence. I abandoned the riff when I realized it was a bit similar to something else, but the acoustic pattern was unusual and led to a certain propulsive tension that suited the fragmented state of mind implied by the words.”
That’s Paul Roberts talking, who seems like exactly one of two people that you really need to pay attention to for this one…
The Rest of the Story
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears started in England’s pub rock scene, circa 1973, playing mostly night clubs. The band’s name came from Roberts - who had wrote a band named “The Tears” into “a dystopian novel” he’d “attempted" - and the band’s manager, who added the “Sniff” to the name as a nod to Roberts’ struggles with hay fever. They knocked around that scene for a year or two, gigging, even recording a dozen songs to shop as demos, but nothing took beyond some paying work. With what looked like nothing but deadends ahead, having a guitarist check out to join the military was all it took for that first line-up to disband. Roberts, for his part, relocated to France to “pursue his painting” according to a 2012 post on blog titled Riff Raf, a theory that, without confirmation, seems entirely reasonable in the grand scheme.
