Thomas Dolby

I'll forgive you if you have the slightly skewed perception of Thomas Dolby as a "one hit wonder." It's certainly true that "She Blinded Me With Science" is his one massive hit, but he wasn't ever really trying to be an iconic superstar. By his own admission, he was a mediocre keyboard player who was most happy plinking out melodies on a monophonic synthesizer and bouncing tracks together to build wacky electronic doodles. He was a behind the scenes kind of guy, and one of the few people to really sit down and learn how to program the early models of computer based (rather than modular/analog) synthesizers. It's one thing to have access to a million dollars worth of brand new audio technology, but somebody has to know how make it do something other than fart out square waves. So, while you might only know one or two of his own songs, you've heard him collaborate with pretty much every famous artist of the 70s and 80s.

I'm not a super fanboy or anything, and i won't bore you with the intricate details of his convoluted discography (lots of remixes, rearranged republications, etc.), but any Thomas Dolby is worth obtaining should you randomly come across it.

I found his EP (excuse me, "Mini LP") Blinded by Science and the "May the Cube Be With You" single from another of his studio projects, Dolby's Cube. They are great fun. I think he's an amazingly unique and versatile vocalist, but he's surprisingly subtle about it. He probably didn't give it much thought, to be honest.

We take this kind of electronic wizardry for granted these days, so it's easy to overlook how groundbreaking his material really is. He didn't learn it from someone else, he didn't drag and drop prefab samples into a quantized grid, he sat at a $10,000 (in 1970s dollars) computer sequencer with a piano keyboard and floppy drive attached to it and figured out how to make pro-level crazy music with it.

I will side with the superfans though, and say i like "One of Our Submarines" better than "She Blinded Me With Science," but all of his output is pretty stellar. I don't think any of his solo work sounds dated at all, and you'd have a hard time convincing me that any big-name artist today is making purely synthesized music that competes at his level.

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