The end always comes eventually. Whether it’s Galactus chowing down on your planet’s resources or the sun setting on another day or the last bite of a big meat sandwich, you gotta stop somewhere.
Image of Galactus by Garfield creator Jim Davis via Issue #26 of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Marvel Comics.
This new tune (a new tune? WOAH!) is a good ending, I think. Maybe try listening to it while your driving home and it’s dark and the lights are coming on and maybe also it’s cold outside. Or, you could use it as your alarm to get up to in the morning at the end of a long night’s sleep of tossing and turning and waking up every 2 hours because your cat is in the Christmas tree again.
It’s a good song for a lot of different times, see? Now have a listen.
Galactus Is Coming also features Andy Trebing on lead guitar parts, which, I think, really make this song easy to float into and get lost.
It’s possible I may squeeze in a couple more song releases before the end of the year, so be on the lookout for those. You can always subscribe to my blog and get post reminders in your email if you don’t want to visit Music Vomit every day like most people don’t.
Why not just ban everyone and everything? You can’t be safe if you don’t, right? Your chair could break under your weight and you’d fall to the floor and you could get a splinter from the wood in your wrist and that could get infected with some sort of bacteria and then that infection left untreated, because, well, no healthcare, could spread and spread and spread all over every part of your body and then it could become airborne and leak into other peoples’ eye sockets and they’d be infected.
It feels good when there’s no escape, right? RIGHT!?
See what I’m saying. Ban chairs, splinters, bacteria, breathing on other people. Just make it all illegal. Put us all in prison. Build walls around us. Chain us to the roof of a car. Do whatever you have to do. Just don’t let any of us people out into the world. WE ARE DANGEROUS.
Anyway, here’s a song about that.
This new one uses some elements of a couple other songs I’ve recorded (this one and this one), as well as this Woody Guthrie one. It’s nice that I can go back to songs I wrote 7 years ago and just take themes and ideas and update them just a little bit. Takes almost no time or effort on my part. Kind of wish that wasn’t the case, though. Kind of wish I wasn’t updating songs about being left behind and shut out and kicked down and dragged around.
Oh, and if you can’t read between the lines, this song is dedicated to Donald Trump, a piece of rotted chair cushion foam left out in the back alley during a week when it rained for 6 days straight. Fuck that guy and his whole entire administration.
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.
Remember when Google set up search results for “miserable failure” to link to George W. Bush? Apparently that was called a “Google Bomb” and miserable failure isn’t linked to Bush any more. But don’t you think there’s another miserable failure lurking around these days? Or maybe an amazing failure? Or super-classy failure? Or unbelievable failure? Yes? Me too. So I wrote a song about lumpy bag of moldy clementines Donald Trump. Have a listen:
Woody and the Carter Family
Now, you may notice, if you’re familiar with old folk tunes, that this new song I wrote about Trump is very similar to the Carter Family song I’m Working on a Building. There’s a few very good reasons for that.
First is, it’s one of my favorite tunes. I play it often and, so, it pops up in my head a lot at random times during the day.
Second, it has some good phrases that I figured I could update to be relevant about today. That’s the best thing to do when writing a folk song. Find an old one that you like, that has a catchy melody and an interesting message and then replace a few words to make it relatable to something currently in the news or your life. I barely even had to change the repeating chorus because Trump does work on buildings. Only thing different is that instead of building a house of good and a structure of hope and faith, he bankrupts everyone and everything he comes in contact with.
Like Father Like Son
Two severely balding orange men standing close together.
Now, the last reason, and maybe the reason that got me writing this new song is closely linked to the idea of creating new songs by rewriting old ones. Last week I was thinking a lot about Donald Trump because of the Republican National Convention and I remembered a news article I read about how Woody Guthrie had written a song about Trump’s crooked landlord father Fred Trump (read all about him here). So I went in search of that article to listen to the song because I thought maybe I could update it to be about Donald.
Only problem is, when I found the article, it turns out Woody didn’t so much write a song about Fred Trump, he just maybe reworked a verse of his tune I Ain’t Got No Home. His “song” about Fred Trump amounts to little more than a few scribbled ideas in his notebook. Not much for me to use. Plus, Woody’s song I Ain’t Got No Home was already a rewrite of the Carter Family song Can’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore. Do you see where this is headed?
Woody took a lot of ideas from Carter Family tunes (and from a lot of other people) and that’s something I picked up on really fast when I started writing my own songs. I didn’t have to try and come up with something completely new and different. I could just update old songs to fit my times and the troubles and triumphs I saw around me. So that’s what I did with I’m Working on a Building.
But that’s STEALING
Yeah, it probably is. I admit that. Although, folk music (and maybe most music) is all stolen. Every new song rests on the shoulders of something that came before it. You might go as far to say that everything rests on the shoulders of what went before it. As we move into the future the past is what we have to stand on. Forgetting that, you fall into a pit of nothing and may never take another step in any direction. I guess it’s only really stealing if you take complete credit for all the words in a song and say all the ideas were yours alone and no one ever did anything like you ever before. No one does that, though, right?
A brand new song about throwing your trash in the street to get dibs
Some nice, high-quality trash, strewn about in the Chicago streets to gain dibs on a parking spot in the winter.
Well, well. Here we are in the depths of Winter, no?
Here we are, Chicago, just freezing our butts off and we gotta get inside so quick.
This song that I wrote is pretty obvious. We all know about the time-honored tradition of throwing your unused chairs and other furniture out into the street to save your precious parking spot. We all know someone who takes dibs regularly. And we all know someone who regularly talks about how they’re the downfall of modern, industrial society.
So it’s a song about dibs. And here are some for you to look at while you listen to the tune:
I based this tune on an old hymnal. Check out the original version. It’s similar:
I Should Say Farewell is first new song I wrote in 2014 (and the first new one I’ve wrote in a long time). Sometimes you just have to do it. You get an idea and no matter what’s been getting in your way, you just say, “fuck it.”
I said, “fuck it.”
But only after a week and a half of sitting on this tune and thinking I’d never write anything else. I mean, by choice. Like, just give it all up. All of this.
But then I said, “fuck it.”
Sometimes that helps.
I wasn’t really sure what this song was about, but after singing it a few times and recording it, I’m gonna guess that it’s about Noah. That’s my guess. It’s biblical. That’s probably why I had no idea when it first came out. Didn’t know why I had to write the words I had to. Didn’t know what they meant at all.
I Should Say Farewell is first new song I wrote in 2014 (and the first new one I’ve wrote in a long time). Sometimes you just have to do it. You get an idea and no matter what’s been getting in your way, you just say, “fuck it.”
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