Rob Harvilla started a podcast about ’90s songs that ended up being about a lot more than ’90s songs.
Harvilla, a rock writer and critic for the last 20-plus years, started his “60 Songs that Explain the ’90s” podcast in October 2020, deep in the fog of the COVID-19 pandemic. His goal was to celebrate the music of the ’90s, the music of his youth, because the music of your youth is always the best music of all time, to you. “The music you loved when you were a teenager is the most pure and most intense love affair you’ll have with anything or anyone in your life,” he says.
He just happened to turn 12 in 1990, so that decade of music — from Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” — is what guided him through adolescence and his awkward teenage years into early adulthood.
Harvilla kicked off the series, which is available through the Ringer podcast network, with Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” and talked about the song as well as the experience of hearing it on the radio, in its censored form, with the naughty bits cut out. Subsequent episodes got a little more in the weeds with his own personal experiences growing up in the Cleveland area, and how the songs he was discussing — every episode is centered on one seminal song from the decade but makes side trips to discussing other adjacent and non-adjacent titles — soundtracked his own life.
And the more he shared those “Midwestern and kind of mundane” memories tied to the music, the more feedback he got from listeners about their own personal experiences with the songs, and the show expanded into what it was meant to become: a memoiristic celebration of pop music, the ’90s, youth and growing up, full of disconnects and asides that are as free associative as all of our relationships with the music of our formative years.
“The theory I had is that everyone has a story tied to these songs that is very important to them and to literally nobody else. But if I tell my story, it will remind you of your story, and that’ll be what’s ultimately gratifying about this experience for both of us,” says Harvilla, 45, on the phone last week from his home in Columbus, Ohio.
Ultimately, his theory worked. “It’s been a level of feedback and a level of personal connection in that feedback that I’ve never experienced before,” he says.
As the podcast progressed, it became clear that 60 episodes was not going to be enough, so it expanded to 90 and later to 120 episodes, all while still keeping its original title, because why not have a little fun along the way.
“60 Songs that Explain the ’90s” is now also a book with the same name, released this week from Twelve Books.
The book is a distillation of the podcast, and in keeping with the show it discusses way more than 60 songs, grouping various titles by spiritual and thematic connections. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” shares space in the “Myths vs. Mortals” chapter with Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time,” while Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” is in the same chapter with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads.” It works, since the ’90s were a harmonious time where all those songs shared space on pop radio and MTV.
Harvilla says the seventh episode of his podcast, dedicated to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” marked a turning point for the show, where his scripts started getting longer and his boundaries much looser. That episode gets to its title song at the two minute mark; a recent episode dedicated to the Cardigans’ “Lovefool” first mentions its subject a little more than 29 minutes in. (The longest script, he says, is the episode on Pantera’s “Walk,” which weighed in at more than 10,000 words.)
An episode on Hole’s “Doll Parts” wound up reaching the ears of Courtney Love, who in turn appeared as a guest on an episode about Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “Without question, it was the single most surreal moment of my entire career,” says Harvilla, who has written at the Village Voice, Spin magazine, Deadspin and more.
Harvilla has a blast connecting the dots between songs, reliving his youth, flexing his rock critic vocabulary and acting as a tour guide through his own, and by extension the listener’s own, memory lanes. The path to that is through tribute rather than demystifying songs or artists, which he says he learned while doing the show.
“It very quickly became clear that celebration was the way to go,” says Harvilla, noting he still gets reaction from an episode on R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming” where a guest trashed the song. “That was the one and only experience with outright negativity and dismissal. I do think this show works way better as a celebration, even if I’m only getting around to personally celebrating some of these songs.”
As the end of the podcast draws near — Harvilla swears episode 120 is the end, and it’s currently scheduled to wrap up with its final episode in mid-February — Harvilla is trying to cover his bases, knowing there’s no way he’ll be able to nail down everything about the decade that gave us grunge, neo-swing, Britpop, nu-metal, pop-punk, G-Funk, rap-rock and “TRL” pop, plus whatever OMC’s “How Bizarre” is.
“I have this anxiety about all the the music, all the songs, all the micro eras I’m leaving on the table,” he says. “This has to be finite, and so I am going to stop, but I am absolutely trying to figure out how to make my peace with everything and everyone I’m not going to get to.”
Heck, even the ’90s had to come to an end.
agraham@detroitnews.com
’60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’
By Rob Harvilla
$30
Twelve Books
In stores now
