Tag: Cynical Girl

It doesn’t get much better than this. This song was off his self-titled debut album Marshall Crenshaw that peaked at #50 on the Billboard album charts in 1982. Marshall only had one chart hit and that was with Someday, Someway off of this same album…it just shows that life isn’t fair at times. Every song is good on this album…you cannot say that about most albums.

Songs like this… is the reason I do this on Fridays.

Marshall Crenshaw on the song: ‘Cynical Girl’ sounds like it just came off the top of my head in one pass; that’s probably what happened. Quite a few of my songs are like that: I just start singing and playing without any advance thought. But then, with ‘Cynical Girl’ and so many others, the words take time to arrive. I asked another person to take a crack at it first but the guy wrote something that had no cohesion. My idea for the lyrics came to me one day when I was walking out of traffic court, just out of the blue. The lyrics have an oddness to them, and humor too; they said some things that I wanted to say. People have sometimes asked me, ‘Who’s it about?’ ‘Did you find her yet?’, etc. It’s really not about a girl—that’s just off-the-shelf rock-and-roll language. To me, what the song says in a funny way is ‘I hate brain-dead mass-culture [stuff] and I want to hang around with people who feel the same.’ People have always really loved that song and identified with it and of course I love that!”

Cynical Girl