Humpjones

St. Valentine Died Screaming, Soaked in Blood

Posted Feb 14, 2011

The most dangerous thing about Art is that you have to actually live it all, sooner or later. As I keep on trucking past my 50th birthday, I have seen nearly everything I’ve ever recorded come to pass one way or another. The Universe runs on dream logic, though, nothing is ever simple here. Except when it is. When She reaches for the sledgehammer, painful is obvious, no metaphors involved.

“I’ll Be Okay” was the last track on my first album. Yes, I obviously mixed it on drugs. To this day, though, I still get a steady trickle of email questions about this particular track, and nobody’s asking about the shitty work I did EQ’ing the vocals.

It’s a particularly appropriate track to have stuck in my head for the 14th of February. I realize a lot of you weren’t raised in the wilderness by redneck hippies, so the reference to “Both Sides Now” doesn’t register for most folks, I know. It’s a particularly great Joni Mitchell track about the big picture that emerges from a short lifetime of breakups, instead of a just a single fresh heartbreak.

feel like a forest fire that won’t die down
and I’ve seen that disaster from both sides now
god alone knows how many lost homes
all over some anonymous dick from Bob Jones

A lot of folks ask about Bob Jones. In retrospect that was just plain not good rapping...it was a play on the ubiquitous Mr. Jones...I was listening to a lot of Amy Winehouse at the time, and she herself got a hit playing on the Billy Paul track about an affair, Me and Mrs. Jones. As a general rule of thumb, I think that if it takes longer to explain a line than it does to actually rap it, that qualifies as a design failure. I rap to communicate, I fucking swear.

love is just another ongoing global war
and all the soldiers are horny but mostly bored
barely trained, and got no protection
running around reckless with some loaded weapons

Always frame up. GO META. Find the larger perspective, then find the next larger perspective, then...then wake up on the front lawn praying you don’t remember it right. Happy Valentines Day. Hope you like the taste of blood.

Filed in: Zeitgeist

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