The Private Canon: Soundalike, Part 2, or "You Changed"

Steve Burdick, Lane Steinbeg, and Steve Katz in 1982.

This post is part of a series.
So the suspense probably wasn't killing you since my last post, in which I tried to pull off an attenuated Internet version of one of my favorite games—i.e., playing a song and asking a person (usually my wife or kids, my captive audience) to guess who the artist is. I've done it with this Bee Gees tune and this early Bowie cut, which, if they don't precisely ape the Beatles sound, definitely evoke some British Invasion-era band you've never heard of, or this Dirty Projectors track, which sounds like it could be an outtake from John Wesley Harding. I've noted before in this space how much Ennio Morricone's theme from The Sicilian Clan sounds like a Radiohead instrumental.

But in this case, I did it with a song that to my ear sounds so much like a well-known artist I know and love it's uncanny—it must have been an homage, I thought. This was the song, posted without attribution.



The answer I was expecting from unsuspecting listeners, and which my wife gave when she first heard this song years ago, was: early Style Council, the Brit pop band from the 1980s headed by Paul Weller and Mick Talbot (or, as I think of them, the better Wham!). To give you some idea what I mean, consider:

I can hear the resemblance not only in the chords but in the guitar voicings, the falsetto backup vocals, the accomplished but slightly off-kilter white soul feel. If anything the "mystery song" sounds a bit rawer, like an earlier model of the Style Council (except in reality that was something quite different). Accordingly I got the Style Council/Paul Weller answer on Facebook when I posed the question from some fellow music fans with long enough memories (the post also netted some interesting examples along similar lines, i.e., Father John Misty and early Elton John, John Cafferty and Springsteen, etc.).

It turns out, though, that the Mystery Song is not by the Style Council at all but by a criminally obscure Florida trio (!) called the Wind. Without further ado, I draw back the curtain:

I first heard the tune via a beloved but now-defunct, early-aughts music blog called Little Hits, commemorated here, which shone a light on obscure pop hits over the years and which its writer, Jon Harrison, ended because he felt guilty about sharing digital music widely and freely without compensating the artists. Well, I was a beneficiary of that open-source treasure chest—indeed I didn't really follow the daily blog avidly, but got a trove of MP3s from a friend who'd been collecting them over the years. Quite a few have joined my Private Canon: Silver Apples' "I Don't Care What the People Say," Tonight's "Drummer Man," the Carousel's "Cerise," Blueboy's "Stephanie." the Boggs' "Remember the Orphans," the Cedars' "For Your Information"—I could go on.

Digging around for more about the Wind (not to be confused with this contemporary California band), I learned that they were nearly as obscure in their time as they are now, recording just one full-length album, the goofily named Where It's at With the Wind (available now at Bandcamp), and an EP with the ghastly title Guest of the Staphs. (These guys really had a thing with almost self-parodically off-putting names: A few of them later regrouped under the hilariously unprepossessing band name Tan Sleeve.) What they lack in taste for titles and band names, they make up for in songwriting and arranging chops; their debut album shows a young band—Lane Steinberg on guitar and vocal, Steve Katz on bass, piano, and vocal, and Steve Burdick on drums—wearing their power-pop influences on their sleeves with infectious exuberance.



Even so, the only reason I'm spending all this time on "You Changed" is that, even without the Style Council connection, on its own terms the song, as the kids say, positively slaps. As promising as all their early material is, this tune sounds like promise fullfilled, with its assured Philly soul bounce, sophisticated harmonies, and suave swagger.

The kicker: Where It's At dropped in 1982, a full year before Paul Weller and Mick Talbot formed the Style Council and recorded Café Bleu, the record that would be slightly rearranged and released in the U.S. in 1984 as My Ever Changing Moods. Obviously Weller and Talbot (a veteran of Dexy's Midnight Runners) hadn't heard the Wind, let alone vice versa. But also obviously both were drawing from the same well of 1960s and '70s soul/pop. It just happens to be, in this case, that the water each drew from that well happened to taste eerily similar—a kind of pop music version of multiple discovery.

Footnote: Steinberg and Katz are still around and making music; they made a new Wind record in 2015 and have a Facebook page. I even found Steinberg on YouTube, still in fine voice on an apparently new quarantine-themed song, and, bringing things full circle for me, covering one of the great standards by my favorite composer, Kurt Weill. For a moment I don't feel so lost.