“American Music” by Violent Femmes

"American Music" went out as a single from Why Do Birds Sing?, the fifth studio album Violent Femmes put out on April 30, 1991, and Gordon Gano wrote every word and note of it. The record closed a chapter: it was the final Femmes album with founding drummer Victor DeLorenzo, who quit two years on to concentrate on acting. To produce, the band called in Michael Beinhorn, whose calling card at the time was the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk and The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, and he shares the production credit here with Gano, DeLorenzo and Brian Ritchie.

The credits read like a house party. Gano plays acoustic guitar and takes the electric guitar solo, Ritchie plays acoustic bass, electric guitar and didgeridoo, DeLorenzo bangs out snare, tambourine, bell and timpani, Beinhorn adds Hammond organ and Tom Mandell keyboards. Gano, Ritchie and DeLorenzo all sing, Beinhorn joins Alex Alvarez, Carmaig de Forest and Mike Kloster on backing vocals, and all seven of them clap along. Susan Rogers recorded it and Eric Thorngren mixed.

In the week of May 18, 1991, it peaked at number 2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart, and it settled in as a staple of the band's concerts.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.