Jonathan Richman was 20 when he started writing the songs that became The Modern Lovers, which might explain why they sound so certain about things he wasn’t.
Richman moved to New York, slept on the Velvet Underground’s manager’s couch and immersed himself in the band’s orbit, absorbing Lou Reed’s deadpan delivery and the liberating idea that a rock song didn’t need to announce its importance. The Stooges supplied the blunt force; the Doors showed how a keyboard could sit inside a guitar band without softening it. Returning to Boston, he formed The Modern Lovers with Jerry Harrison, Ernie Brooks and David Robinson. Together, they built a sound that was almost aggressively simple: chugging guitars, a locked-in rhythm section, spare structures and occasional keyboard counter-melodies.
“I’m in love with the modern world”
The band recorded the songs in 1971 and 1972, with John Cale producing six of them, but broke up before the recordings finally emerged in 1976. By then, Richman had moved toward the gentler, stranger music that would define most of his career. The album became a snapshot of four young musicians playing songs written by Richman when he was still trying to figure out girls, cities, adulthood and himself. His lyrics can sound insecure, even needy, but there’s nothing tentative about the playing.
“Roadrunner” is the obvious engine, its primitive drive nodding toward the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” while Harrison’s keyboards flicker around the guitars. Richman isn’t conquering the road. He’s thrilled that the road exists. “Astral Plane” takes that yearning somewhere stranger, its sparse arrangement leaving plenty of room for Richman’s voice to reach for something it can’t quite name. “Pablo Picasso” is deadpan swagger built around an admission of inadequacy. The joke lands because Richman sounds like he hasn’t quite decided whether he’s kidding. The Modern Lovers sound like a band that has figured out how to play rock and roll before its songwriter has figured out how to live.
“Old World” turns outward, looking at a disappearing past without pretending to understand what comes next. “She Cracked” is more jagged, the guitars and rhythm section charging ahead while Richman’s narrative falls apart. Then “Modern World” puts the album’s central tension into plain view. Richman stares at the present with equal parts suspicion and fascination. He isn’t rejecting the modern world so much as trying to take its measure.
The influence spread quickly. The Sex Pistols covered “Roadrunner.” Talking Heads and Television absorbed the idea that rock could be reduced to a few hard musical ideas without losing its force. The Pretenders inherited some of the same directness and restraint. Much later, They Might Be Giants, The Hold Steady, Dry Cleaning and Horsegirl found their own ways to make eccentricity sound completely natural. But the deeper inheritance was permission: Richman could be awkward, funny, earnest and occasionally ridiculous while the band played with muscle. The music didn’t smooth out his oddities. It gave them somewhere to go.
The cover gets this exactly right. Its lean, stark design, with the band’s name and heart logo glowing against darkness, looks like a neon sign stripped down to its essential parts. Punk and new wave were still taking shape, but the look was already there: no frills, no clutter, just the name and that heart.
The ideal listening environment is obvious. Put it on in a car after dark. “Roadrunner” insists on a windshield. Let the lights pass, radio on, destination optional. The songs make ordinary things feel newly available: highways, gas stations, streetlights, the fact that you’re young and moving. It doesn’t matter if you’re cruising I-285 instead of Route 128. The geography changes. The impulse doesn’t.
The Modern Lovers’ breakup makes the album even more curious. Richman never really returned to this sound. He moved toward the gentler, more eccentric songs that would become his signature. The Farrelly brothers eventually put that side of him on screen, with Richman appearing with his guitar in There’s Something About Mary as a kind of musical narrator. Harrison joined Talking Heads and Robinson joined the Cars, both finding far more mainstream fame than the Modern Lovers ever sniffed.
The lingering question The Modern Lovers leaves behind is simple: how did this little collection of songs, recorded years before anyone was ready for them, become a template for so much of what followed? Maybe the answer lies in what made Richman seem out of step. He never tried to sound finished.
The Modern Lovers recorded a future they couldn’t have known was coming. Then the band disappeared, the tapes waited, and other musicians found them. Punk heard the guitars. New wave heard the economy. Later generations heard the awkwardness and the nerve. Everyone took something different.
The Modern Lovers still sounds immediate because it never feels trapped in its own era. Richman was young, the band was brief, the record arrived late, and somehow all of that left the songs room to travel. The remarkable part isn’t that we still hear ourselves in them. It’s that the songs keep finding new ears.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “I’m Straight.” Credit where it’s due, I had a high school boyfriend who was utterly obsessed with The Modern Lovers. He showed me this song one hot summer afternoon. At first, perhaps I liked it because he did, but soon realized the magic and humor, and fell for the theatrics too. They say every relationship leaves you with something, whether that be a lesson or trauma, but thankfully this relationship left me with a newfound appreciation for Jonathan Richman in all his unseriousness and authenticity.
“I’m Straight” buzzes like a landline off the hook. On one end of the wire is a yearning, jealous man who is watching, in real time, as someone else woos the one he wants. The part about him being straight may be a little white lie as it sounds like he stumbled out of a dive bar, found a payphone, and left a long message he may not recall in the morning. In a regretful, out-of-breath pitch, the man proposes a Venn diagram comparing himself and this “Hippie Johnny” character to prove he’s the better choice. (Hippie Johnny is always stoned. Our narrator is always straight.) Half confessional, half performance, and growing more confident with every sentence, the mellow conversation turns louder and more gritty. The band backs him as if they’re his best friends who convinced him to call.
I later heard “Hospital” in the 2017 indie film Hot Summer Nights, and it rekindled my love for the ragged, slurred, and honest music of The Modern Lovers. Years had passed, and I found myself in a much different chapter of life, but their songs could still meet me where I was. You don’t need to be polished or perfect to understand them. Just come as you are and you’ll fit right in.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Pablo Picasso.” It has been covered plenty of times, prominently by Bowie, but the definitive take, for me, belongs to Burning Sensations, whose “Pablo Picasso” is a cornerstone of Repo Man, the greatest punk movie soundtrack ever, or maybe just the greatest damn soundtrack, period. I first caught the flick on late-night cable in high school, the kind of accidental discovery that could scramble my brain for a few hours, or apparently for life. I didn’t know what the hell I was watching, which was precisely why I couldn’t stop. Punk kids, repo men, aliens, glowing car trunks, generic beer, generic food, the Circle Jerks, a cult, Harry Dean Stanton looking like he’d seen the apocalypse and found it irritating.
Then comes the “plate of shrimp” theory: patterns everywhere, connections nobody else can see, the universe apparently leaving clues on dinner plates. It was absurd and somehow completely convincing. That same deranged logic makes Burning Sensations’ “Pablo Picasso” such a perfect fit. If a plate of shrimp can be a message from the universe, why couldn’t Picasso’s stare be a superpower?
Richman’s original is even stranger. The proposition that Pablo Picasso was a sex symbol is preposterous, particularly coming from a guy who spends much of the album sounding like he could use a lot of help talking to women. But then Cale’s piano lays down a hypnotic foundation, the jangly guitar scribbles around it, strange little interjections keep popping up, and somehow Richman makes the case. For a few minutes, Picasso’s stare really does seem irresistible. At that age, I wanted an El Dorado and an unblinking gaze. I wanted to be immune to rejection. I wanted to never get called an asshole. Richman didn’t tell me how to get there. He just made me believe there might be a secret.
The Modern Lovers’ music is available on streaming platforms and in some record stores, and you can hear their songs on SiriusXM’s First Wave and Little Steven’s Underground Garage. Richman himself remains stubbornly analog, famously avoiding the internet, cell phones and most forms of digital communication. It feels fitting. The songs that once put him ahead of his time still travel the old-fashioned way, from record to record, town to town, car stereo to car stereo. Richman was in town back in March at Terminal West with his longtime drummer and driver Tommy Larkins, still living the troubadour life, just at slower miles per hour.
The road keeps going.
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