Career
Shear has recorded almost 20 albums to date. He made his first appearance on vinyl with Funky Kings; he also led the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful pop group, Jules and the Polar Bears, along with later groups Reckless Sleepers and Raisins in the Sun. He also conceived (and hosted the first 13 episodes of) the MTV series Unplugged.
His songs have been more commercially successful in the hands of other artists, notably Cyndi Lauper, whose recording of "All Through the Night" reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984, and The Bangles, whose recording of "If She Knew What She Wants" reached number 29 in 1986. Singer/songwriter Iain Matthews (still using the spelling "Ian" for his first name at the time) recorded an album of Shear's material, Walking A Changing Line: The Songs of Jules Shear, with synthesizer-dominated arrangements (and some previously-unreleased songs of Shear's), in 1988; Matthews had previously recorded Jules Shear songs on other albums.
Shear was the subject of a song by 'Til Tuesday, "J for Jules", after the end of his relationship with that band's singer, Aimee Mann. He also co-wrote the title track of that album, Everything's Different Now, with Matthew Sweet.
He described his Sayin' Hello to the Folks as a "mix tape" of his favorite songs. "I felt like recording songs that I like a lot that I didn't write," he told Paste's Eliot Wilder in 2004. "I thought it would be good to record songs that didn't have a life but should've had a life. This is my attempt at giving them a life." He and Stewart Lerman, the album's producer, selected 12 songs from an original list of 60. These included covers by Todd Rundgren ("Be Nice to Me"), James Brown ("Ain't That a Groove"), and Brian Wilson ("Guess I'm Dumb").
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