Dip A Toe In The 'American Dad! Greatest Hits' Tracklist
Dip A Toe In The 'American Dad! Greatest Hits' Tracklist
Soundtrack releases Friday in time for Monday’s season premiere of the long-running Seth MacFarlane series
We are now less than a week away from the newest season of American Dad!, which premieres Monday on TBS. Its first soundtrack, American Dad! Greatest Hits will be released Friday, and slowly the show’s social channels are revealing the tracklist. When I started writing the article, TBS’s tracklist playlist only featured 12 of the 17 songs, throwing the cropped screencap into doubt, but it soon became clear that the 17 songs, up nicely from the originally-reported 13-14, was accurate. The good lord gave us this soundtrack so it’s time to break it down.
Kicking things off, we have what else? “Good Morning U.S.A.”, the show’s theme song, sung by Stan Smith, voiced by Seth MacFarlane. The song was previously released as a single, but it’s got a 2005 date (as in version 1) yet also cover art with open curtains (as in version 2). The playable sample on that release is the very end of it with the choir singing the title line, so it leaves it unclear what version it is. The Greatest Hits release may or may not be the first time version 2 (which has Roger, usually disguised, get in a “good morning USA!” before screaming as Stan forcefully hides him) gets a release. Second, we have the boy band banger “Girl You Need A Shot (Of B12 (Boyz 12))”, the debut single of well, Boyz 12, from the season eight episode “Can I Be Frank (With You)”. Boyz 12 is a boy band supergroup that merged Steve (Scott Grimes), Barry (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Snot (Curtis Armstrong) and Toshi (Daisuke Suzuki)’s group “Boy Bomb” with two other boy bands, "Boy Jam" and "Boyz With Mouthz", as initiated by Snot’s uncle. This teamed the four of them with Georgie, TJ, Parker, Abraham, Boris, Abraham H., Constantine, and Victor, a girl. The group ultimately goes unsigned.
Next up, “Hot Enough” from the ninth season’s 17th episode “Rubberneckers”. With Stan in jail for insurance fraud because of entanglement in a web of lies surrounding his unwillingness to fess up to Francine (Wendy Schaal) about checking out other women, Steve begs him through this song to come clean. Fourth, we have “Good, No Great Job”, which is definitely two distinct songs in one, from season 11’s seventh episode “The Devil Wears a Lapel Pin“. The main is performed by Hayley, voiced by Rachael MacFarlane, who after all her hard work on the CIA calendar she intended on destroying, finally received the lukewarm compliment she’s been craving from her father for years. However, as she’s performing in celebration, her plan to destroy it was still being enacted by her husband, Jeff Fischer (voiced by Jeff Fischer), and aborts the performance. It is there where the show must go on, so German skier turned fish Klaus (Dee Bradley Baker) picks it up and improvises a refrain about drunkenly killing three teenagers.
“When I Was His Alien” was a rather yearning piece by Roger, feeling like Steve isn’t giving him enough attention, to the point he’s unsure if Steve even likes him anymore. He gets quite nostalgic. Coming from the twelfth episode of season 2, it’s not the oldest song on the list, but it’s right up there as second-oldest. “El Perro” is an in-universe song by the “Mexican singing sensation” Cilantro, who is never seen but is voiced by Dan Navarro. The song itself could probably be best described as a wacky string of non-sequiturs entirely in Spanish. Debuting in the fourth season episode “Roy Rogers McFreely”, it’s first heard during the car chase between the remnants (Greg and Terry) and allies of the disbanded neighborhood watch (Stan, Hayley, and others) and Roy Rogers McFreely, a Roger persona who ascends to head of the Homeowners Association just to have a say in things if he can’t have one in the Smith home. He later dances to the song under a streetlight. Outside of the theme song it is the song on the soundtrack that most comes back in the series, reappearing in “Stan’s Night Out”, “A Nice Night For a Drive”, and “The Wondercabinet”.
“Guppy Love”, titled onscreen as “Guppy Love (Fishin' Ain't Easy (Where My Sluts At?)” is Klaus’s rap that devolves into being about 7/11 and everything he eats from it, originally featured in season 13’s “The Never-Ending Stories”. It subsequently appeared in “The Hand That Rocks the Rogu”, “Beyond the Alcove”, and “Gernot and Strudel”, so it’s right up there with “El Perro” in terms of frequency. The soundtrack’s oldest number is “I Want a Wife” from season 1’s “Stan of Arabia”, where Stan expresses great desire for Francine to be the subservient tradwife like he knows from TV. It’s brought on as she’s on something of an independence streak of her own activities while he believes it requires his permission. Frankly I’m surprised this got in over the two-parter’s other musical number, “Worst Place in the World”, which has a reprise at the end. “Hungunder”, from last season’s “Stan Fixes a Shingle”, the advertised 350th episode, features Francine singing about having drank all the hangover-free beer Steve created and not feeling hungover at all, with an interlude from Hayley and Jeff about a different kind of “smashed” with Gallagher’s hammer.
“Bad, Bad Boy” is another Steve song from the ninth season Christmas episode “Minstrel Krampus”. It’s part of an uncharacteristic tantrum in a sense of toy entitlement. “Stelio Kontos Theme” from season five’s “Bully for Steve” is well, the theme song for Stelio Kontos, the Greek giant that was Stan’s bully as a kid, and who Steve enlists to knock some sense back into Stan after he believed becoming Steve’s bully would toughen Steve up. A new version would be made in “The Full Cognitive Redaction of Avery Bullock by the Coward Stan Smith” to include Steve’s bully from that episode, Luis, but that doesn’t look like it will be included. “The Weeknd's Dark Secret” from season 15’s “A Starboy is Born” is indeed sung by The Weeknd, and is about why he won’t sleep with Hayley. Abel at least has a cleaner record than say, Cee-Lo Green. The “Top of the Steve Theme” is the theme song of the fake backdoor pilot to Top of the Steve, where in the season 13 episode of the same name, Steve doesn’t realize his being sent to an all-girls boarding school is the setup for such a spinoff (which wasn’t actually in the works, it’s just the plot).
We get another short Steve ditty with the “Mail Song” from season 17’s “Dressed Down” where he sings about bringing the family the Mail. Jeff finally gets a song on the album with the “Zooka Sharks Rap” which he sang to stop the local professional football team the Langley Falls Bazooka Sharks from moving to Ottawa in “The Professor and the Coach”. It’s the second-newest song on the album, only being several episodes sooner than “Hungunder”. Rounding out the album are the two songs that were namedropped when the album was announced, “When I Dress My Body” from season 12’s “Fight or Flight”, where Klaus dreams about all the clothes he's going to wear when he finally has the body he wants, and “Daddy’s Gone” from the season 7 premiere “Hot Water”, where Steve wallows as Stan’s hot tub obsession peaks at the expense of his family. Again, transparently tiptoeing around Cee-Lo’s music.
TBS has largely built its Greatest Hits playlist on new uploads of each song, even if their YouTube already has it, so it matches the posts on the socials which have the identifying titling. So if you’re ever missing the visuals, they’ll be there. There are certainly omissions, but this is not a bad selection. And yes only 12 of the songs had their individual art released by the time writeup completed.
Sources: American Dad!/TBS, American Dad Wiki
Is it mostly tracks from the TBS episodes, or is some material from the FOX years also included?