I love Morphine's music now, maybe even more than I did in the '90s. And it's always bummed me out that the band's last two studio albums, 1997's Like Swimming and 2000's The Night, weren't readily available on streaming services. Ironically, their decision to jump from Rykodisc to a high profile new label co-founded by David Geffen, Dreamworks Records, seemed to actually make their later albums harder to find in the digital era after the label ceased operations in 2006. But I was happy to see that Like Swimming and The Night were finally added to Spotify by Geffen Records, I think in just the past few days. So I had fun finally being able to draw from all of Morphine's albums to make a playlist.

Morphine deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. All Your Way
2. Come Along - live
3. Mary, Won't You Call My Name?
4. Good
5. In Spite Of Me
6. French Fries w/ Pepper
7. So Many Ways
8. You Look Like Rain
9. Bo's Veranda
10. Sharks
11. Candy
12. I Know You (Pt. 1)
13. I Know You (Pt. 2) - live
14. I Know You (Pt. III)
15. Shade (I Know You, Pt. IV)
16. Shadows (I Know You, Pt. V)
17. Wishing Well
18. Scratch
19. The Night
20. Lilah
21. Rope On Fire
22. Dawna
23. Yes
24. Gone For Good
25. I'm Free Now

Tracks 4, 8 and 12 from Good (1992)
Tracks 3, 5, 11, 22 and 25 from Cure For Pain (1993)
Tracks 1, 10, 18, 23 and 24 from Yes (1995)
Tracks 6, 14, 17 and 20 from Like Swimming (1997)
Tracks 9 and 13 from B-Sides And Otherwise (1997)
Tracks 7, 19 and 21 from The Night (2000)
Track 2 from Bootleg Detroit (2000)
Tracks 15 and 16 from At Your Service (2009)

I remember seeing Morphine perform "Honey White" on The Jon Stewart Show in 1995 and just being blown away by this band that was so utterly unlike anything else on the alt-rock circuit. In retrospect, I got interested in music in the first half of the '90s, when rock was probably more exclusively centered around guitars than at any time before or since, to the point that anything outside of that felt like a novelty. But Mark Sandman's two-string slide bass, Dana Colley's baritone sax, and Billy Conway's swinging drums just felt like such a breath of fresh air when I was still just starting to look beyond grunge. I borrowed my friend Steve Anderberg's copy of Yes, and fell in love with that band. I don't think "All Your Way" seemed like an immediate stand out to me, but now it's just one of my favorite songs ever, I never get tired of it.

Cure For Pain is my favorite album from 1993 and one of my favorite albums of that whole decade, and it amused me to see that Playboi Carti and Drake are about to release a single called "Pain 1993" that I'm sure has nothing to do with that record. It was hard to even figure out what songs from Cure To Pain to fit on this playlist and what to leave off, the whole thing is pretty much perfect. Each album feels a little inconsistent by comparison, but I think each record has classics.

I always thought Like Swimming was a really excellent, underrated record. But I had mixed feelings about The Night, Morphine's final album that Sandman self-produced and was reportedly really happy with but didn't live to see the release of. Revisiting it now, though, it holds up pretty well, I respect the more out-there mixing decisions that set it apart from the band's signature sound.

Sandman also finalized the live album Bootleg Detroit for release just before his death, and I reviewed it for Pitchfork at the time. I always really loved that record's opening song "Come Along" and was shocked it never appeared on any of their proper albums, so I was happy to recently find that there's a studio version of it on the 2009 compilation At Your Service, although I still just love the sound of the Bootleg Detroit version. At Your Service also features two more chapters to the series of songs titled "I Know You" that appear on the band's proper albums, so it was fun to collect them all here.

I really wanted to see Morphine live and came close a couple times (once, we went to the 9:30 Club when they were playing the late show -- Morphine was sold out, but we got to see the early show, which was Hepcat). So I was pretty heartbroken in July 1999, when I was 17 and getting ready to go to my summer job, when I saw the news that Mark Sandman had suffered a heart attack onstage in Italy and died. One of my favorite songs was "French Fries w/ Pepper," where he declared "by 9/9/99, I hope I'm sitting on the back porch drinking red wine." So it really made me sad that he didn't live to see that date. Last year on 9/9/19, I sat on my back porch, listened to the song, and had a glass of Merlot.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17, 2020 at 3:54 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.