Brick by Brick by Iggy Pop

Brick by Brick came out on Virgin in June 1990, and it's Iggy Pop cleaning up his act, sonically at least. After a run of records that drew mixed notices, he brought in Don Was, a longtime devotee of the Stooges, to produce, and the two of them went for straight-ahead hard rock with no gimmicks. Waddy Wachtel and Kenny Aronoff came in as session men, Slash and Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses pitched in as writers and players, and for the first time on a studio album Iggy strapped on a guitar himself, handling most of the six-string parts alongside Wachtel and Slash. Charles Burns drew the cover.

A lot of the songs take a hard, worried look at America, a country Iggy sees rotting from the inside and ready to cave in, and he sings them in a weathered baritone. The album's big moment is a tender one, though: "Candy", a duet with the B-52s' Kate Pierson, his gravel against her bright soar, and it became the only US Top 40 hit he ever had. "Home" swaggers, "Something Wild" snarls, and "Livin' on the Edge of the Night", which had surfaced earlier on the soundtrack to the Michael Douglas film Black Rain, got to number 16 on the Modern Rock chart.

The album itself reached number 90 on the Billboard 200 and hung around for 37 weeks, and Was would produce Iggy again on Avenue B in 1999.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.