Third and final chorus? “It’s my thrill, it’s my wonder, etc.” And “I’m right where I always dreamed I would be.”
In the first pass through the chorus, Post ponders the woman on her TV screen and directs everything to “her” - “it’s her thrill, it’s her wonder, it’s her will, it’s her way home.” In the second time through, it’s “your.” “And I know that you miss me by the way you kiss and resist me.” After the band drops out for a second to let Post deliver the seething “You monkey, you left me,” she taunts her ex. You can’t change.”Īnd she’s not getting out of your head. “You’re right where you always wanted to be. Oh, you want to break up? Yeah, she doesn’t need your shit right now, OK?Īnd it’s not her, it’s you. She’s on the road - the verses start in Bristol, London and Philly - and wearing down, tired of the hotel TV and a little groggy. Post wrote this one, and she takes the listener through the journey. The journalism veteran in me hates to pass along unverified info, but we have to consider the prospect that these are three loosely related snapshots rather than one prolonged nasty breakup.īut we’re going to proceed under the notion that this is at least partially an “up yours” to an ex. The first verse, according to two unverified accounts on the interwebs, refers to PJ Harvey and is probably not meant to be insulting. (And an interesting counterpart to the Gordon-penned Loneliness Is Worse, the soaring power ballad asking the age-old question, “Don’t you wanna be happy with me?”)Īt least, we think this is a breakup song. This is one ferocious kick in the teeth with haunting melodic hooks. But when it comes to whoever is the target of Shutterbug, their loss is clearly our gain.
While we can’t blame Veruca Salt for Taylor Swift’s career of angry breakup songs, it’s pretty clear that one should not do wrong by Post or Gordon. (As things started falling apart, she dated Stacy Jones, the drummer who replaced her brother, Jim Shapiro, in Veruca Salt.) Post, like many celebrities and snowboarders of the time, dated Dave Grohl.
Gordon was dating Blake Smith from a band called Fig Dish. A couple of decades had gone by since Heart had supposedly smashed the stereotypes that women don’t play rock, but Heart had spent the 80s doing schlock-rock ballads for MTV consumption, and critics were determined only to take Liz Phair seriously at her most explicit.Īnd yes, Post and Gordon attracted a considerable amount of gossip. They were underrated because there was still an element of the rock press that couldn’t get over the notion of attractive women playing electric guitars. “Sequel” was literal in this case - lead single Volcano Girls featured a callback to their breakthrough single Seether.īoth of these albums are underrated classics, entertaining relics of a time in which a handful of rock bands actually had a sense of melody.
Three years after coming out of nowhere with a powerful series of rock hooks on their debut album American Thighs, the quartet fronted by Louise Post and Nina Gordon roared back with the 1997 sequel Eight Arms to Hold You.