(Credit: Gie Knaeps)
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
In the seven years between starting college and moving in with the woman I’m now married to, I had eight different roommates. Some of those roommates were good friends, strangers who I eventually got to know better, or acquaintances that I’d quickly learn weren’t so easy to live with. And then there was Jace. He’s the only Jason I’ve ever known who went by ‘Jace,’ a choice that I don’t really care for. (Sorry if you’re a Jace, maybe you could change my mind.) But I can’t say much else about Jace, because in the year we lived together, it felt like he never said more than a dozen words to me. If I tried to make small talk, it was like staring into a void. If we needed to discuss a pressing apartment-related matter, it was like pulling teeth. Now, with 20 years of interviewing people under my belt, maybe I’d be able to talk to Jace, but back then, it felt impossible.
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I’d loved the music of Jonathan Richman well before I lived with Jace. But I didn’t hear one of Richman’s best albums, 1992’s I, Jonathan, until a couple years later. And I was dumbfounded by how perfectly Richman articulated my awkward roommate situation, and presumably his own, on the album’s third track. “Your sense of humor has gotten worse / Now that you live with a guy who can’t converse / You can’t talk to the dude.”
Jonathan Richman has dozens of songs about incredibly specific experiences or aspects of the human condition that nobody else ever thought to put into a song. It’s one of the things that makes him an indispensable and truly original songwriter.
Apparently, I’m not the only person who can heavily relate to “You Can’t Talk to the Dude.” The Lemon Twigs covered it over a dozen times on tour in 2017, and Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo played the song during a Twitch livestream in 2020. “You Can’t Talk to the Dude” also made a welcome return to Richman’s own concerts in 2025, so you might hear him play it on his upcoming U.S. tour dates in February, March, and June.
Three more essential Jonathan Richman deep cuts:
“Somebody To Hold Me”
The way that Richman pronounces the word “uncomfortable” in this song from 1983’s Jonathan Sings! is simply fascinating.
“True Love Is Not Nice”
Jonathan Richman has been a cult hero with little chart success for over 50 years now. But his biggest moment of mainstream exposure came in 1998 with the blockbuster success of the Farrelly brothers comedy There’s Something About Mary, which featured Richman and his trusty drummer Tommy Larkins as the film’s recurring Greek chorus, commenting on the plot in song. One of the songs Richman sang in the movie, “True Love Is Not Nice,” appeared on his album I’m So Confused a few months later.
“No One Was Like Vermeer”
Richman has been writing memorable songs about painters since the Modern Lovers classic “Pablo Picasso,” including “Vincent Van Gogh” and “Salvador Dali.” The tribute to 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer on 2008’s Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild may be Richman’s finest moment as an art critic.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
