“Blood and Roses” by The Smithereens

"Blood and Roses" introduced the Smithereens in 1986 as the first single from their debut album, Especially for You, on Enigma Records, and it is power pop with a shadow running right through it. Pat DiNizio wrote the words and the music, and the song came to him in pieces: he was trudging home through freezing rain around four in the morning from his job as soundman at Folk City in New York when the bass line arrived, with the chords and melody built around it later.

You can hear that origin. The bass line is the spine of the record, a low, prowling figure that the guitars and hooks wrap themselves around, and it gives the whole song a nocturnal chill. DiNizio wrote it about a girl he had known in high school who took her own life, and he took the title from a short story by Yukio Mishima, one of his literary heroes.

The single climbed to number 14 on the US Mainstream Rock chart and scraped in at number 99 in Australia, and its video cut the band together with scenes from the 1986 film Dangerously Close. "In a Lonely Place" came next.

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