This is a fan favorite and probably the funkiest song I’ve recorded yet. It’s a simple cautionary tale of how celebrity, glamour, ambition and just-plain inauthenticity can twist a human soul. I hit similar thematic territory in The Lady Vanishes, but I’ll talk about that later.
I played this song for a group of Nashville music professionals 4 or 5 years ago as part of a songwriting contest. Not only did they not like it, one of them commented that she would have preferred it if there had been an actual point to the song, instead of just stringing together words that sounded cool. I maintain that this says much more about Nashville than it says about me.
Here’s another kind of opening song, nowhere near as welcoming as Open Like A Door. In fact, it’s defensive, defeatist and cynical. I hope it’s also a little funny. You can be the judge.
I suspect you’re at least somewhat familiar with the sentiment here. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, video games are corrupting the hapless youth and Y2K panic is giving way to 2012 panic. There’s always something to panic about because it’s patently obvious that we’re all doomed, doomed, doomed and look, the sun’s coming up on another day of … maybe we should just go back to bed and wait for that inevitable end, huh?
When I first encountered the apocalyptic flavor of this mindset, it threw me for a loop. That was back in ‘91 while I was living in Orlando. I had a job bleaching the mold off of motel walls (Bush Sr. recession, remember), and one of my cheery coworkers informed me that he absolutely believed that the world was currently breathing its last and … well, there was no “and”. That was it. No more us.
It took me a while to try and work out a way to react to this statement. Eventually, the best I came up with was to flatly ignore it! Even if it were true, agonizing over it does nothing but petrify us and stop us from doing anything that might be worthwhile because, you know, we’re all gonna die anyway. That’s a miserable existence as far as I’m concerned, even if it does end up to be short.
So that little bit of history is deeply embedded in this cheery little song. Try not to worry too much about my mental health after you read the words … I once had a concerned fan come up to me during a coffeehouse gig to reassure me that Jesus did, in fact, love me. I thanked him, said I knew that, and that that wasn’t the point.
The point is that it’s just plain fun squeezing words like “entropy” into pop songs.
Oh, and if anyone reading this isn’t sure who the heck Donald Fagen is, he’s half of the classic jazz-rock band Steely Dan. They have a song called “Deacon Blue” which includes the immortal couplet “I cried when I wrote this song/Sue me if I play too long.” At least when I stole it, I dropped the name of the rightful owner.
