110: Sparks - Interior Design (1988) - The Toughest Girl in Town

“The Toughest Girl in Town” opens side B of Interior Design with one of the album’s real growers. The title might suggest something louder or tougher, but the track is surprisingly warm, patient, and almost triumphant, building slowly from a sparse opening into a bright, layered arrangement.We talk about how sincere this one feels by Sparks standards. The lyric is unusually generous, even admiring, and the music matches it with a light, bubbling atmosphere — somewhere between 80s movie glow, synth-pop balladry, and the warmer side of acts like The Blue Nile.The song also has a curious afterlife. Long dormant, it was revived live by Sparks in 2023, likely after being covered by The Immediate Family — a supergroup of legendary LA session musicians who heard it, loved it, and turned it into a guitar-rich, Tom Petty-like rock version. It’s a rare case of an obscure late-80s Sparks track finding a second life decades later.