“Joey” by Concrete Blonde

"Joey" sits ninth on Bloodletting, Concrete Blonde's third album, and it came out in 1990 as the song that finally broke the band wide open. Johnette Napolitano wrote it and sings it, and she dashed it off in the back of a Philadelphia taxi, heading for a photo shoot. Getting it on tape was another matter: the words were so hard for her to face that she kept putting them off, and it ended up the very last vocal cut for the album.

You can hear the weight of it. It's a slow-burning, aching rocker, James Mankey's guitar chiming and swelling, Paul Thompson's drums steady as a heartbeat, Napolitano and Mankey both credited on bass, and her smoky, cracked voice carrying the whole thing somewhere between a plea and a confession. The band produced it with Chris Tsangarides for I.R.S.

It became their biggest hit, spending four weeks on top of Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks and crossing over to pop radio for a run to 19 on the Hot 100, their only appearance on that chart. It went to number two in Australia, where it finished 1990 as the 16th-best-selling single, and to number four on Canada's RPM 100 Hit Tracks.

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