90s Stand Out Singles: The Breeders “Cannonball” (1993)

I Was The Bong And The Reggae Song

CD Single Artwork. (Source: albumsthatrock.com)

I was pretty sure my love for Kim Deal couldn’t get any stronger. But I was wrong.

Once the Pixies broke up in 1993, Kim continued full-time with her side project, a band called The Breeders. The group had been a revolving door of who’s who in the indie music world. And as the year started, The Breeders filled a few vacant spots in their lineup and headed into the studio to record their second album, “The Last Splash.” The album was really good, but it also fired out one of the most iconic singles of the decade, a little ditty called “Cannonball.”

In thinking back on the song I almost immediately want to start playing air guitar. Much like Radiohead’s “Creep,” “Cannonball” had an undeniable hook that came from an unlikely place. It wasn’t vocal, it wasn’t a guitar “riff” or even a drum fill. It was a muted guitar strum that punctuated the spaces in the chorus. “Won’t you Coo Coo, Cannonball….(chucka chucka chucka, chucka chucka).”

A guitarist gets that noise by holding their left hand over the open strings of the guitar with enough pressure to “mute” them but not enough to actually make a note. Then they run the guitar pick up and down over the strings that sends a noise to the pick up which electrifies it. If you do this through a distorted channel, the noise can be highly percussive. In essence you can temporarily turn the guitar into a drum. And it’s a pretty cool sounding drum that can take over the listener’s ear if used in the right spot.

There’s more to the song than just this trick. And there’s more to this band than just this song. But these moments in “Cannonball” were the type of things that allowed the underpinnings of Indie Rock to invade the Mainstream.

And isn’t that the story of the 90s in a nutshell?

Watch the video for this song and you’ll see a group of three ladies (with a guy on drums) who are pretty unlikely rock stars. And yet, they are. They smile and pound their way through this song with the kind of cool that can’t be manufactured, it has to be earned.

And even with the big bright spotlight of popularity on them, the Breeders remained who they were: a group of indie rockers who called each other up one day and said, “You wanna jam?”