May 23, 2014
Lazy couple shakes teen twerks. Native beef a slur. Word choice or a farm gay? Bias!
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Lazy couple shakes teen twerks. Native beef a slur. Word choice or a farm gay? Bias!
Well, this is another Chicago-inspired tune that I wrote several years ago. In 2008! But, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right?
So, the CTA is still crashing trains, but instead of Mayor Daley making things right, we've got Rahm Emanuel.
I wrote the original version about a CTA crash on the blue line, but since there was just recently this one (or, even this one that I saw happen), I figured I better update the song a little. You can read about the original version and listen to it here. Or, if you feel like supporting a local musician, buy the song here. You'll notice the differences.
For one, Chicago isn't trying to get the Olympics any more, but Mayor Rahm does want to use our hard earned dollars and change to build a shiny basketball arena for DePaul University. They MUST need it bad, huh? Go ahead and read up on it. The Chicago Reader always has some good points.
Anyway, I always enjoyed this song. Singing it, performing it. I'm adding it back into my lineup. Maybe you'll catch a show where I play it sometime soon?
Hey! You can now download this song for FREE by clicking here.
If you've been reading my Medicated Artist posts over on MusicVomit.net, then you'll know why it may have been such a struggle for me to record this song. I'm not really sure why, but it took every ounce to just do it.
Weird.
Anyway, this is the 93rd version of this series and I don't see any point in stopping. Sometimes I think I should, but can't after reading a headline like this:
Miss America: Butt glue and more highlights
It's funny on it's own. Someone took the time to write that. Someone brought home the bacon by writing that. But then, also think about how, maybe, the same person wrote this headline:
Multiple bodies inside navy yard
See how it becomes even more insane? Why do I need to know about both of those things in such close context?
Is someone who's really excited about Miss America also going to be interested in reading news items about death? It's possible, I guess, but I wonder....
Can you retain any of that information that your bombarded with? And how would you even read the thousands of different headlines that are on CNN.com every single day? IMPOSSIBLE.
Even if you just skim the brief, somewhat-vague-somewhat-descriptive headlines, you'll never remember more than one or two. I can't. But, maybe my memory just isn't good.
Are one or two headlines all the information you need to make it through the day? Maybe so.
Usually, I just want to drink coffee all day and be left alone to think about donuts and when I should get a haircut. So, I can get by on one or two headlines.
Sometimes I wonder about everyone else, though. How does everyone else see this world? How do they navigate it? What are their relationships like? What do they hold close? And how much do they let out?
And then I go back to considering sprinkles or no sprinkles or an afternoon haircut or an evening one.
Here's a song I wrote last night really late. Kept me up when I shoulda been fast asleep. Maybe I shoulda tried harder to shut my eyes. Oh well. This is what you get.
It's in drop-d tuning and it's vaguely like the old time song "Handsome Molly." I even lifted some elements from that song and rewrote them a bit. I've done that about a million times. To Handsome Molly, and to so many other tunes too. It's what I do. It's just folk music. Pretty simple stuff.
Now I am going to bed tonight. This tune was the new song make up for the new song that I didn't write the week of February 11, which means I'm almost all caught up. Just need to write a new tune for last week...and then, of course, one for this week and re-recorded the song I wrote this week in 2011.
So, in reality...no rest for me. Which is a good thing when you're trying to write songs. The more you do it, the more songs you write, and the more songs you write, the more good songs you write.
Now, of course, it's a lot of work, and not a whole lot of rest. The easiest thing to do is sit back and eat a whole bag of Cheetos. Or spend time looking up exactly how to spell Cheetos.
Either way you wake up the next morning with a full stomach, right?
Songs from Someone Else’s Perspective Week…Tuesday, August 31…The Talkin' CTA Blues
Here's a song I wrote a few years back. It's a true story. So true that when I play this song out I usually tell people it happened to me. It felt like it happened to me. Here's what actually happened: http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/Blue.Line.Loop.2.329992.html
But, then again, you could just search for "CTA Blue Line Crash" and you'd come up with a thousand different examples, the most recent being this: http://www.wgntv.com/wgntv-blue-line-smoke-aug28,0,5246199.story
Anyway. It's a funny song about a sad thing. It's almost as funny as this article: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=155614
Finally, Chicago is tops in something.
So I took the point of view of someone on the train. But, really, we were all on that train because we all ride every train and if you haven't yet been in a CTA accident then you surely will soon.
The Talkin' CTA Blues is also on my new album "It's Chicago!" that just came out on August 10. You can buy and download either just this one song or the entire album, which is all about Chicago, at CDBaby.com or through iTunes.
Or, you can always come out and see a live show and I'll have real, touchable CD albums.
Hope ya like it.
