A Necessary Evil

Album: Oui (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this song, King Roeser of Urge Overkill is having girl problems. She's driving him nuts, but instead of cutting her loose, he decides to put up with her, frame-shifting her faults in "a necessary evil."

    "It's a bit of a commentary on songs like 'Wild Horses' that have a saying that is kind of a colloquialism," he explained to Songfacts. "People say, 'It's a necessary evil.' This is a situation where the necessary evil is how it's not great to think about things in a very specific way all the time. Leaving things open-ended is OK. Things may not be perfect, but that's a necessary evil. The perfect is the enemy of the good."
  • This is a track from Oui, the first Urge Overkill album since Rock & Roll Submarine 11 years earlier. The band made a name for themselves in the '80s when they found a following in the Chicago music scene. In the early '90s, things started happening: they opened for Nirvana and their cover of Neil Diamond's "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" landed in the movie Pulp Fiction. But their trajectory quickly changed when their 1995 album Exit The Dragon was poorly received. They split up a few years later and didn't re-form until 2004. For the Oui album, they included one cover: their take on George Michael's "Freedom," which was released as the first single.

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