This is the first song I've actually "finished" in almost 50 years. Obviously, being fenced in during the COVID pandemic had a lot to do with it. More importantly, the contributions of four friends--Harold Goodman, Stuart Anderson, Scott Jarrett, and Michael McKern—practically forced me to move this song from a half-hearted folk song that I might play for friends hanging around our backyard on a summer evening to what it has turned into (whatever that is). I’m not sure there is a better outlet for something like this than YouTube.
Parts of it were recorded in home studios: Michael McKern’s drums, Harold Goodman’s bass part, my vocals, acoustic and electric guitars). Some parts were recorded live through Jamkazam sessions: Scott’s keyboards and Stu’s steel guitar were pieced together, and synchronized, from several live recordings over a couple of months. The percussion instruments and some other “instruments” are Apple Logic X effects from Logic’s “Drummer” feature.
The song was produced and mixed in Logic X (v10.3.2) by me at home in my funky upstairs spare bedroom/office on a 13-year-old Mac Pro 3,1 running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) through a MOTU UltraLite-mk3 interface, in case you are interested in that sort of thing. If nothing else it proves that I am not constrained by not owning state-of-the-art hardware or software, as good or bad as the outcome may be. I’m old, my gear is old, and it’s a race between me and the gear to see who plays out first. I expect the gear to win. The vocals were recorded with an AKG C141ULS, an RE18, and the acoustic guitar was my Composite Acoustics OX recorded both with the C414ULS and the guitar’s pickup, a Seymore Duncan Mag-Mic pickup (thanks for the recommendation, Brian). And that’s about all there is to say about that stuff.
The song is, obviously hopefully, about the dark, decadent times we live in and the very similar times I have experienced all through my 72 years. From my early years of duck-and-cover exercises in 1950’s Cold War Midwestern grade school classrooms to the Vietnam War that commenced as I became a teenager to the collection of endless wars and invasions the country has mindlessly and arrogantly engaged in since Reagan’s gangsters and the host of faux-conservative, Republicans and Democrats, who represent the 1% of the country who profit from wars, who profit from ecological devastation and neglect, who wallow in the spoils of economic inequality that defines this country, and the despicable people who are profit by lying to a gullible public that is too lazy to read a book, who won’t bother with understanding history, science, or technology, and who imagine that complaining about their government is in some way “participating” in democracy. As the song says, we’d rather be lied to than to have to raise up on our hind legs and do something to make the country and world a better place.
One of my favorite 1950’s science fiction authors, Theodore Sturgeon, said something like “90% of everything is crap.” Since my years protesting the Vietnam War, I have been convinced that Mr. Sturgeon was an optimist. I doubt that more than 1% of anything is more than shit. So, keep lying to us and we’ll keep believing it. We’re Americans and “nobody ever went broke under-estimating the intelligence of the American consumer” (except Trump, of course, because he can’t even get that right).
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