“Add It Up” is a song by American rock band Violent Femmes, released on their 1983 debut album Violent Femmes. It contains the lyrics: “Why can’t I get just one screw / Believe me I’d know what to do / But something won’t let me make love to you . . .” Band member Gordon Gano commented: “I was in my bedroom – that’s where I wrote it – feeling frustrated. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. It just happened to feel good lyrically . . . and it still does.” The song title was used as the name for the compilation album by the group, Add It Up (1981-1993). (More from Wikipedia)
Violent Femmes could be viewed as the quintessential indie rock band, with its near-acoustic sound and alternative-rock sensibililty. Gordon Gano (guitar and lead vocals) formed the band while he was still in high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the early 1980’s with Brian Ritchie (bass guitar) and Victor DeLorenzo (drums). Their debut album, Violent Femmes (1983) featured angst-ridden crowd-pleasers like “Blister in the Sun”, “Kiss Off”, “Add it Up”, and “Gone Daddy Gone” (including a verse from a Willie Dixon song).
Regarding the Violent Femmes album Hallowed Ground, James Christopher Monger writes in Allmusic: “The album’s centerpiece, a searing indictment of loyalties broken and the snitches that break them, ‘Never Tell’ is the perfect balm for the bloody righteousness of youth; and when [Gordon] Gano screams, ‘I’ll stand right up in the heart of Hell / I never tell’, it’s hard not to stand right beside him. Christian imagery aside, Hallowed Ground is not as polarizing as some make it out to be. The band explores gothic Appalachian folk and child murder on the banjo-fueled ‘Country Death Song’, bawdy and bluesy Lou Reed-inflected infatuation on ‘Sweet Misery Blues’, and nuclear holocaust on the brooding title track [‘Hallowed Ground’], leaving little doubt that this is the same band that penned underground classics like ‘Gone Daddy Gone’ and ‘Add it Up’. Even the decidedly politically uncorrect ‘Black Girls’, with its free jazz mid-section that includes everything from jaw harp to the screaming alto sax of John Zorn and the Horns of Dilemma, is full of the same smirk and swagger that made ‘Blister in the Sun’ the soundtrack to so many people’s halcyon days.”
(November 2014)
