"Blame It on Your Heart" by Patty Loveless, 1993

I didn't grow up listening to country. Unless you count the several Grateful Dead songs that could rightly be called country, and that one Old & in the Way CD I had, I didn't like anything that was remotely country music until probably this song*.

In July of 1993, I was nineteen and living at home for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. Three years earlier, in 1990, I--along with many, many other teenage boys of a certain cloth--fell in love with Samantha Mathis in Pump Up the Volume. It stands to reason, then, that when a little movie called The Thing Called Love, starring Mathis as a struggling singer-songwriter in Nashville, turned up on the TV after its fairly dismal theater release, I stuck with it. "Blame It on Your Heart," as performed by River Phoenix and Mathis, comes up for a couple of important scenes. It stuck with me. I found it had been released as a single by Patty Loveless, and I bought the CD, probably with my Columbia House membership.

I'll include both versions here. Loveless's is obviously insanely better.

*Okay, I liked "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," but only 'cause it was a story song about some crazy shit.