With many artists, there's absolutely no mystery as to where they hail from. The Beach Boys are quite obviously from Southern California, and Bruce Springsteen has made a career out of being a New Jersey native (at least, he might be). These six artists, however, sound as if they came from one place, but are actually from somewhere else entirely.
1. Creedence Clearwater Revival
Creedence Clearwater Revival is likely the most famous example of a band that sounds like they came from one place, but are actually from another. With its bluesy, swampy sound and songs like "Proud Mary" and "Born on the Bayou," it's easy to assume that CCR is a band from Louisiana, or at the very least the Deep South. However, CCR was one of the countless bands to form in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid '60s. Frontman John Fogerty wasn't even born on the bayou, but in Berkeley.
2. Christian Death
With its debut album Only Theater of Pain, Christian Death rang in the arrival of deathrock, which takes atmospheric goth rock and combines it with Misfits-style horror themes. Though the band sounds as if it was formed in the same British school of gloomy rock music as the Cure and Bauhaus, Christian Death is actually an American band, from sunny Los Angeles, no less.
3. The B-52's
The city of Athens, Georgia is an unexpected hotbed of alternative music within the Deep South and has given the world such great bands as R.E.M. and the B-52's. Though R.E.M. has some southern gothic elements in their music, the B-52's campy party atmosphere doesn't sound at all like a typical southern band, but rather a band from a more urban environment such as New York or L.A.
4. PJ Harvey
If there was a main difference between British and American indie rock during the '80s and '90s, it was guitar noise. British bands like the Stone Roses, Blur, and Pulp had slick, clean sounds, while American bands like the Pixies, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr. were fuzzy and raw. Based on this dichotomy, PJ Harvey's early songs come across as classic dirty American alt-rock, despite the fact that she's British. Her great 2011 album Let England Shake would make her roots much more explicit.
5. Thin Lizzy
If someone played Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak LP for me and then had me guess what country the band was from, I'd guess the United States immediately, and more specifically some working class city like Cleveland or Detroit. Despite the fact that Thin Lizzy had a classic American hard rock sound to them like Aerosmith or Alice Cooper (and had distinctly American song titles like "Cowboy Song"), the band actually formed in Dublin in 1969.
6. Tom Waits
Though Tom Waits is a definitively American treasure, he could have come from pretty much any part of the country, based on all of the geographical references in his lyrics (this map provides an excellent visual of this idea). He's written songs about New Jersey, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and New Orleans, and has done so with blues, jazz, country, polka, and beat poetry. Those who guessed L.A. would be the closest to correct: Waits was born in Pomona, California.
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