88 Lines about 44 Women

The Nails lead singer Marc Campbell wrote the lyrics to this song, and composed the music with their keyboard player David Kaufman. The song is exactly what the title says: a brief description of 44 women, each getting two lines of verse. Campbell went into what he calls a "trance state" when he started writing about the women, some of whom were real, some that were made up, and some he's not sure of, as Marc believes his mind may have constructed a few of the memories. One of the women in the song - the one whose line is "Tanya Turkish liked to f--k while wearing leather biker boots" - became Campbell's girlfriend about 30 years after he put her in the song. In a 2012 Songfacts interview, he said: "I got divorced three years ago after 18 years of marriage and it was devastating. Somebody said, Marc, have you checked out this thing called Facebook? So I checked out this thing called Facebook and I hooked up with some old friends in Manhattan, and we decided I was going to drive to Manhattan from Texas and visit my old friends and have dinner with them. And one of the women that attended was Tanya. Well, we hooked up and the rest is history." (Here's our full interview with Marc Campbell.)

The lyrical approach to this song was inspired by a 1970 book length poem by an underground poet named Joe Brainard. His collection was called I Remember, and every line began with that phrase, for example: "I remember with fried shrimps in restaurants, not enough tartar sauce."

If the backing track to this song sounds like a preprogrammed keyboard track, that's because it is. The Nails had a studio/rehearsal space in the New York apartment where they lived. David Kaufman turned on the rhythm track to their Casio keyboard, and Marc Campbell played along on drums. They liked the sound and recorded it onto a cassette tape. The track they recorded was a little under five minutes long, which gave Campbell enough time for 88 lines of lyrics (44 couplets). He told us: "Curiously, 88 is a pretty cosmic number. There are 88 keys on the keyboard. "Rocket 88" was a key rock and roll song. So I wondered, what can you write 88 lines about? What can you write 44 couplets about? Well, I mean, what is there, really, other than women? Maybe cars for some guys. But what were the big things in my life at that time? Sex, drugs, rock & roll. So it came down to women. I didn't have to really think twice about it. I'm actually making it sound as if I made a choice. I didn't. It just was obvious."