Total News

Song - Total News

Artist(s) - Tom Blades

Released - 1996

Primetime Usage - 1997-05

Contained on - ATMOS 81 (Current Affairs)

Featured Highlight - Rams @ Eagles, 2002


I finally found one of the missing staples from the later years of NFL Primetime.  "Total News" created a good balance of laid-back fun & energetic tension that saved a lot of otherwise unimpressive game highlights—it's no wonder they used it a lot over the final 9 seasons of the show.  Following Leading Edge, Total News is both the second Primetime track discovered in the Atmosphere library and the second one composed by Tom Blades.  I am currently searching this library to hear if there's more.

Oh, and special thanks to Josh Ochs on youtube.  There's a 1998 Washington Capitals broadcast video posted by Dan Conroy that periodically uses this song.  I asked if anyone knew the song in the comments, and Josh Ochs ID'd it for me.

As for Total News's highlight, here's one of the worst played games of all time…

*SIDE NOTE* - Universal Production Music revamped their whole website a few days ago and all of the album URLs have changed.  It's now universalproductionmusic.com instead of unippm.com and I have fixed all the links on this website to reflect the change.  The "UNIPPM" blog label has also been replaced by "Universal."

Theme #17

Song - Leading Edge

Artist(s) - Tom Blades

Released - 1989

Primetime Usage - 1991-97, 2001-05

Contained on - ATMOS 11 (Sporting Edge)

Featured Highlight - Seahawks @ Cardinals, 2004


If you've encountered any of the downloadable NFL Primetime mp3 sets or youtube postings of said sets that have been floating around the net at least a decade, you've noticed that they sometimes have names attached (some are even accurate!) and that they sometimes are denoted simply by "NFL Primetime Theme #XX."  "Leading Edge," by Tom Blades, is the track from those collections usually referred to as "NFL Primetime Theme #17."  It's just as synth heavy as most of the Primetime songs that debuted around 1990, and the best way to describe the feel of it is probably "laid-back electricity."  It's also surprising, given the style & instrumentation similarities to the briefly used Sonoton stuff, that Leading Edge would end up having one of the longest tenures of any music track on NFL Primetime.

I can't find really any biographical information regarding Tom Blades, so there's not much to say here about him.  This is the first Primetime track I've found from the Atmosphere (ATMOS) library, however, and I'm motivated to check out some of the other early CDs from that service in the future.  Also…  special thanks to Will Pitts on youtube, whose posting of this song randomly showed up on my "Recommended Videos" section so I could identify it.

To profile Leading Edge, here's a game with Emmitt Smith & Jerry Rice suiting up for teams we all forgot they played for.  It was also Smith's final 100-yard game…