My Top 2000 Songs #1077: The Bitterest Pill

The Jam's penultimate single--full title, "The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)"--is also their most ironically titled. However much I love the song, I've always found it a bitter pill to swallow. Sounding little like The Jam I fell in love with, the 1982 single is the closest they came to straight blue-eyed soul, heralding the band's break-up that would soon follow, and introducing the blueprint for the sound Paul Weller would undertake with The Style Council.

Oddly enough, while I love the Who/Kinks-styled punk-flavored Jam, and have never had any interest whatsoever in The Style Council (and only intermittent enjoyment of Weller's solo work), I somehow really like this song. I'm not sure if the band-breakup vibe is a plus or a minus here, but the song just feels unusually emotional. Probably more mixtape friendly than much of the Jam's catalog, at least when you're going for something with broad reach.

Slightly rougher early take:

They never played it live, having broken up shortly following its release, but here's a tribute band giving a fine approximation of how it might have sounded as a proper Jam song (rather than essentially a Weller solo track):