Laughing Out Loud to No One: An Interview With Marshall Crenshaw (Part II)

"I’m going to take that one out of circulation and just bury it in a deep hole"

Marshall Crenshaw’s Field Day 40th Anniversary Expanded Edition out now on Yep Roc

The first album has this ease to it, where I feel like on one listen I instantly got everything there is to get. But I had to adjust to the second one, so I love them for different reasons. And then Downtown is a totally different record from the first two. I like that record a lot, too, but I always wondered if it was a little bit of a fuck-you to the label to make something even less commercially viable, because Americana and alt-country didn’t have a radio format yet in 1985.

It's so crazy, I really should write a book just to explain everything I haven't because all the stuff that went down behind the scenes after Field Day and then leading up to Downtown is just like…it’s too much. If i started talking about it now we’d be on the phone until tomorrow morning.

Is there any one particular label story from that period that sticks out to you that you might want to relay?