There are some songs that give the artist’s audience the image the artist wants to project, I assume he wanted to project that image. In these often debut recordings the author gives his back story and lays the foundation for his entire future career.
A great example is Billy Joel’s first hit single Piano Man. I doubt you’d find many Billy Joel fans who don’t believe that Billy once played piano in a bar before becoming a pop star. I don’t know if Billy Joel actually played as a lounge pianist but that was the story he gave us and it stuck.
The band Boston had a track off their first album titled Rock N Roll Band which started with the line, “Just another band out of Boston...” The ironic thing was that Boston was not a band at all but a studio project and the musicians on the record had never played a gig together. That song made people believe that Boston was a real band with a long history together, had paid their dues and thusly deserved their success.
The title track of James Taylor’s breakthrough album, Sweet Baby James, not only referred to him by name (although the James in the song was actually his new baby nephew named after him) but also told you that he was down deep a “lonely cowboy” reborn in Massachusetts.
The Beatles huge hit She Loves You helped establish the four lads from Liverpool not as your romantic rivals the way Elvis was but as your friends who are interceding on behalf of your estranged girlfriend who wants to make up. They are a gang you could join and many English boys did which gave birth to the all the British Invasion bands of 1964 -65.
David Bowie’s first hit A Space Oddity was the first attempt to establish his image as a spaceman which he accomplished with his The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Presenting himself as an androgynous space alien made him acceptable to an audience that would not have accepted what he really was, a rather flamboyant bisexual.
Record company experts say your first single is your calling card and should reflect as much as possible what you’re all about. The Rolling Stones’ belligerence and sexuality was all over (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and the Moody Blues romanticism was duly noted on Nights In White Satin. My Generation established the Who as angry young men and Sufin’ Safari certainly augmented the Beach Boys surfer image.
I suppose if I were to follow my own advice my lead off single should be a remake of the Weird Al Michael Jackson parody Eat It.
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