In 1981, singer Aimee Mann dropped out of Berklee College Of Music to join the punk band The Young Snakes. The band released a five-song EP titled Bark Along With The Young Snakes in 1982.

A year later Mann formed the internationally successful new wave rock band ‘Til Tuesday with boyfriend (and former Berklee classmate) Michael Hausman.

In 1984, the Boston Globe described The Young Snakes as “atonal and kind of avant-garde”, to which Mann replied:

When I first quit The Young Snakes, I was like – art rock – get it out of here! Avant-garde – forget about it! … I just felt a sort of contempt for that whole art rock kind of thing. If you just play absolutely weird stuff like we were playing, you’re fooling yourself if you say, “Well I’m so good that somebody’s just going to bestow success on me.”

Mann further explained to the LA Times in 1985:

I had been writing with two guys in the band. The stuff turned out badly. It was this awful, art-rock, experimental trio that wasn’t going anywhere. We just played around Boston. The other two guys got in the way. I wanted to write songs like I’m writing now – love songs – but they objected to any love songs or any songs that had melody. They were into lyrics that didn’t mean much. I wrote lyrics about weird subjects, like one about this autistic guy.

In 2004, a retrospective compilation was released including the recordings made between 1981 and 1982 that were intended to be the band’s debut LP.

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