Track Listing

1. Divine Intervention
2. I've Been Waiting
3. Girlfriend
4. Looking at the Sun
5. Winona
6. Evangeline
7. Day for Night
8. Thought I Knew You
9. You Don't Love Me
10. I Wanted to Tell You
11. Don't Go
12. Your Sweet Voice
13. Does She Talk?
14. Holy War
15. Nothing Lasts

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36539 in Music
• Published on: 1991-01-01
• Released on: 1991-10-22
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

Album Details
Japanese Re-Release Containing Bonus Tracks.

Amazon.com
After being dropped from A&M Records thanks to Girlfriend's rough edges, Matthew Sweet might hardly have expected great commercial success when another label brought the album out toward the end of 1991. But an alternative-welcome climate at rock radio stations, along with undeniably great songs and aggressive lead-guitar work by ex-Voidoid Robert Quine and former Television member Richard Lloyd, made the disc an eventual gold-selling hit. Years later, Girlfriend's probe of romance found, lost, and found again continues to sound fresh and daring. --Rickey Wright

Customer Reviews

Sweet's Power Pop Masterpiece
It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since Matthew Sweet unleashed this pop/rock masterpiece.

While Sweet has released some excellent albums in the past decade (and last year's 18-track Time Capsule anthology is a great place to start for the uninitiated), Girlfriend is Sweet's perfect album. It's full of great melodies and pop hooks, and in Richard Lloyd (co-founder of the band Television) and Robert Quine (Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Lou Reed) the album boasts two terrific lead guitarists. Standout tracks like "Girlfriend" and especially "Divine Intervention" are reminiscent of Revolver-era Beatles, only with grittier guitar. But there's more to Sweet than loud guitars. For example, listen to the lovely ballad "Winona" or the achingly beautiful "You Don't Love Me" which both employ the plaintive pedal steel guitar work of Greg Leisz (who has worked extensively with Dave Alvin). And on "Thought I Knew You," Sweet plays lead guitar and sounds a lot like R.E.M.

With a running time of just over sixty minutes and fifteen songs, you'd think there might be some weak tracks, but they are all perfectly crafted power pop delights--all written by Sweet. Thanks to hometown boy Matthew Sweet, Nebraska has contributed something to popular music besides Zager and Evans, who recorded "In the Year 2525" back in 1969. This is a terrific album--and check out the 1950s-era cover shot of Tuesday Weld. [There's another black-and-white shot included in the booklet along with song lyrics.] This album should have propelled Sweet into superstar status--and the title track did go Top 10 on the Modern Rock charts--but in a pop world where boy bands and precocious nymphettes reign supreme, Sweet seems doomed to cult status. There's a void in you music collection if it doesn't include this album. ESSENTIAL

A rock masterpiece that gets better with age
I bought this album the week it came out because I read that it featured extensively one of my all time favorite guitarists, Robert Quine (cf. Richard Hell and the Voidoids or Lou Reed's THE BLUE MASK). And indeed, one of the reasons this album is so extraordinary is Quine's absolutely blistering guitar work (though ex-Television guitarist Richard Lloyd plays lead on the equally blistering "Divine Intervention"), which contrasts magnificently with Sweet's superb songs. Without Quine, however, the songs might be a bit too sweet (bad pun intended), a fault of some of his other albums. But without the great songs, there would be nothing for Quine to play against.

When this album came out, Sweet was a bit of an oddity. He had released a couple of albums that featured nice pop songs and a synthesized drum track, which rendered the songs rather more lifeless than they should have been. On GIRLFRIEND, however, Sweet gets a full live, crack band with some of the best guitarists in the world. As a result, you get a phenomenally successful collaboration between arguably the greatest guitarist to come out of the punk movement and a first rate songwriter. As a fan both of great songwriting and great guitar playing, there are few more thrilling moments in rock for me than songs like "Girlfriend," which opens with an off-the-chart Quine intro, the gorgeous verses that follow, only to segue back into a scorching instrumental break. Does it get any better than this?

Luckily, the great songs just keep on coming all the way to the end of the album. This album is just chuck full of great moments. Check the end of the guitar break at the 2:53 point of "Looking at the Sun," or the tremolo guitar that Lloyd Cole contributes to "Don't Go." Listening to this album again in 2003, it is as if "Holy War" had been written yesterday. The album appropriately ends with the marvelous "Nothing Lasts," featuring only Sweet singing and strumming an acoustic guitar while Quine plays a remarkably subdued electric.

There are so many more things I would love to mention if I had space, like the way Sweet on the album isn't afraid to be a fan of pop idols, as seen in his love song to Winona Ryder (whom he didn't know) or Tuesday Weld (whose photo appears on the album cover) or Madonna (who is thanked in the credits with the words "hey, you never wrote me back"). A great album, and one that has held up magnificently over the decade since it first appeared.

A power pop classic
This record was a revelation when it came out, and remains as vibrant and bracing today. It is one of the absolute best power pop records of the 90s, a decade in which that genre experienced something of a renaissance (Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Velvet Crush, Jellyfish etc.)

Sweet had made a couple of unremarkable records before this one. I think two things made it leap out of the CD player and into our collective conscious. One was the sublime twin guitar work of Richard Lloyd (Television) and Robert Quine (NYC downtown guitar hero and notably on some of Lou Reed's most powerful work.) These two guys blaze and smolder throughout these melodic, harmonic songs, providing more bite and panache than most records you will hear in any genre. The performances of Quine and Lloyd in service to Sweet's catchy numbers creates the illusion of two tigers tamed; you can feel the excitement of their ferociousness on every track, even the soft, cotton-candy-sweet "Your Sweet Voice."

The second thing that makes this record stand apart is the fact that it is a break-up record, and a great one. From the optimistic second tune, the infectious "I've Been Waiting," through to the desolate "Nothing Lasts," you can hear Sweet laying bare the gamut of emotions involved in a relationship and its dissolution. Like Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones or Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights-or perhaps most aptly, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours-a good break-up record transcends time and trends and endures.

Every subsequent Mathew Sweet record has a few gems, and some folks will even argue that the follow-up, Dinosaur Act, is the better album. It is a good one, but this is where the Mathew Sweet legend begins and reaches its fullest heights.