Missing You (John Waite) Sky Jack Cover

In the 80's John Waite belted out this bad boy for one of the greatest songs of his era. It was his biggest hit, and he's still singing it. He even did a country version with Alison Krauss. Tina Turner did a version of it in the 90's that I always thought was kind of an Ike burn song. It's been covered a million times. Brooks and Dunne, Rod Stewart, and tons of others have done it. I hate pretty much all the covers, including even the Alison Krauss duet. It always sounds overly earnest or over-produced or just too loud.

I think it tracks better as a stripped down sad and quiet song. You could argue that a belting lament is always welcome on a record, but I'd say the song's too good for that.

I love how old-fashioned it is. It mentions long-distance lines, which is so funny because there's no such thing anymore. It reminds me of how hard (and expensive) it was to have a long-distance relationship back in the day when you could barely hear someone through the static of a long-distance phone call. You might as well send a telegraph to be clear. So he sends his lover's soul a telegraph! That's really funny and sappy and such a true feeling for a little pop song.

I love how he admits to lying to himself and how he confesses to his hyperbolic desperation. The confessional parts of the song are simply great because they're intimate and relate-able.

Anyway, here's my sad version of it. I'm noticing myself looking down a lot in these videos. I'm looking at the microphone. It looks like I'm reading or something, but the whole point of me doing these is to really live in the songs, so I memorize the lyrics and change them a little when I sing. I do actually care for you to know that I'm not reading these lines. 

What is the Peaky Blinders' Theme Song?

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds RED RIGHT HAND

I'm probably one of very few people who had heard of the Peaky Blinders before the show came out. I'd heard the name before whilst studying gangs of London. And I thought they were an East End gang. Turns out I was wrong, but the name got me interested enough to check out a new gangster show. I don't like gangster shows very much. They make me hate cops and feel like the world is a meaner place than it actually is.

But when I turned on this show ready to dislike it, a song came on that sent me back to 1996. Back then the coolest show on TV was called the X-Files. My brother and I loved it so much we bought the CD: Songs in the Key of X. I was already very into music, and I knew every name on the track list but one: RED RIGHT HAND by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

We were both immediately converted into life-long Nick Cave fans.

I even bought magazines that included free CD's compiled by Nick Cave. Nick Cave introduced me to PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue and countless other artists. He's director, a musician, and artist; he's a renaissance man. And it was the X-Files that brought me to him. He even did the secret tracks on that album. It was a magical disc.

Anyway, I love the show; it's awful. It looks like someone watched Miller's Crossing and went nuts with blurry filters, so it looks beautiful. The writing is a kind of selective/convenient realism; people break bones and sweat and drool, but they also get shot with old-fashioned bullets and survive over and over again as if their shoulders are made of steel and the bullets are made of rubber. They can't decide what tone to take when it comes to victims of PTSD or the plight of the working class, London Jews, the IRA, and don't even get me started with women.

When it comes to women, the show's writers can't decide if women are rational agents, emotional tinder boxes, preposterous ex-machina plot devices, expository vessels, or sex toys.

There are two sisters in the Shelby family that can't seem to develop into real characters.

Polly was the secret brains of the operation in the beginning of the series, who kept the business profitable when the men were at war. That doesn't last long. By the second season she's hysterical, over-emotional and given to fits of rage. The other sister is a convenient communist and a black sheep but is easily corralled and used by her brother.

There's a secret agent love interest named Grace, but she wears out her welcome by the end of the second season. But there's also a horse trainer who is all business and seems like a better match for the tone of the story. That might not last long either, though.

The show has some major issues. It's derivative to the extreme. One can't watch it without being reminded of its predecessors--shows like the Black Donnelly's, movies like the Godfather trilogy, the Road to Perdition, Gangs of New York, etc. But the performances of Sam Neil and Cillian Murphy and the ensemble cast of rogues keep it interesting. . . and like I said, it's a very pretty show to look at. It's kind of like Deadwood that way. So if you're looking for an English version of Deadwood with slightly more inventive stories, Peaky Blinders is for you.

They sew razor blades into their peaked caps and swing them like scythes at their enemies!

And you can't beat the theme song. It's so good they sneak in various artists' covers of the song wherever they can.

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Beautiful people in violent situations make for great TV. Also, if you like the Pynchonian approach of putting a little-talked-about historical period or event under a magnifying glass in order to investigate a microcosm standing in to take your questions about human nature, what better time than 1919-1925?

The flappers are dancing, the music is loud, the cars are the fastest thing anyone had ever seen. And it's all made modern with contemporary tropes and a great all-around soundtrack.

It's fun seeing 1921 Bugatti's and Ford's and Aston's driving around old cities carrying their own cans of gasoline for long journeys. It's fun to hear "we've just arrived at Heathrow [by boat]; it's just one more day 'til we're in London." It's fun to see people drink every time they meet anyone and smoke and cough their way through a day. And it's always fun to see the villains more virtuous than the cops and the Corleone-esque desire to make a legitimate go of it in a society invested in the established hierarchy.

Anyway, check out the show if you want, but definitely check out Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

I Have a Podcast Now: Tea Time with Sky Jack

This is my first attempt at a podcast. My plan is to drink tea and talk about things that interest me every week. Maybe it will be funny. Maybe it will be sad. Either way. It's my first one, and I hope you kind of like or at least enough to see if the next one is better.

Laptop Hunt

Yesterday, I entered a transitional phase of life, leaving Nacho Daddy. This is for the best. I have a lot planned for 2018, and new opportunities are already presenting themselves.

I'll write a bit more about my experience going into this transition because I think there's a decent story there, but I first have to find a new laptop.

And since I've been trying to get my Amazon Affiliate game stronger, I figured I'd try something new: Native Ads. So, buried in this post is a chunk of code that should give me suggestions on which laptop to buy. My plan is to click on that ad and let it guide me to my Amazon purchase. 

I basically just need something to help keep me creative. I need a laptop that has a camera so I can continue ruining songs with my FG820 blue sunset guitar and meteor mic. Starting and maintaining a podcast is one of my resolutions for 2018, so I need to get that going ASAP. Anyway, I need a Laptop... and it has to be blue.

If you're wondering about the photo to the left, I googled "sexy girl transitioning from one job to another in the sexiest way possible" and that's what came up with a link to this sexy article »

Famous Blue Raincoat

Here's where I ruin that song by Leonard Cohen everyone likes.

When I was a teenager, a girl said her favorite poet was Leonard Cohen. I was really into the Beat poets back then. But I knew Leonard Cohen because of Concrete Blonde's cover of Everybody Knows, and I'd heard a few of his other songs via Jeff Buckley. Back at her place she showed me a book called Stanger Music. I was instantly in love with both her and him.

Fast forward a few years, and I'd met a Finnish woman in Germany, but she moved back to Finland. We were using phone cards and payphones to keep in contact because texting was expensive and there was no such thing as social media. We decided to meet in Warsaw: September streets and coffee shops and the Fotoplastikon and the Jazz Jamboree atop the Palace of Culture and Science.

When she got back home to Vaasa she sent me a book and a mix-tape. The first song on the mix-tape was her favorite: Famous Blue Raincoat. It was the first time I'd heard the song. It was the last mix-tape I ever received. I never saw the girl again. I listened to the song over and over again to try and figure out what was so painful about it.

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• "My brother, my killer" to be cuckolded might feel like being killed, and a friend might seem like a brother, but there's also an implicit forbidden vaginal theme here. Brothers, after all come from the same woman. These two have also shared a woman.
• "You treated my woman to a flake of your life" something as insignificant as a flake from one perspective is monumental to another. What is a flake of life? Rhyming thematically with the "lock of your hair," the shadow man literally gave to her, it's a nice figurative echo.
• "Four in the morning the end of December" seems like just a throw away until you think about it. "I see you there with a rose in your teeth" is great since roses are a winter-blooming/December flower. And in the end when it's revealed the song is an epistolary you realize how much time has passed since she's been writing the thing. His woman Jane has awoken to blithely send her regards to the letter's recipient. The day has begun. He's been writing this thing for hours.
• "Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes; I thought it was there for good, so I never tried" has to be one of the saddest lines of any song ever written.

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Leonard Cohen played the Palace of Culture and Industry in 1985. It was hugely controversial at the time because everyone thought he would be too political on the wrong side of the iron curtain.

Leonard Cohen wrote all the songs for one of my all-time favorite movies McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Leonard Cohen performed a song with Manu Chao calle Partisan, which is maybe my favorite song by him. Plus, Manu Chao is cool.

Leonard Cohen is considered by most to be some kind of renaissance man. I think of him as a poet and novelist who made some very good songs.

He died in November of 2016, and the world is better off having known his presence and much worse for the loss of it.

I actually used an earlier edition of this book for my trip to poland »

Born in the USA

This is where I ruin that Bruce Springsteen everyone loves.

This song about someone remembering the Vietnam war ten years afterward is powerful in that its lyrics read like flashbacks. The narrator remembers how he got into the war, how he couldn't get a job afterward, how his friend died over there after having fallen in love with a Vietnamese woman, and how now he lives in the shadows of the penitentiaries and the fires of the refineries.

Springsteen hid all this in a pop anthem. Brilliant in that it's preserved for people like me who strip away everything and think about the words.

My microphone was giving me problems on this one, but I liked how it watered down the guitar and made my voice sound a little washed away too. So I haven't re-recorded for those reasons. Seems more painful and ruined this way.

The last line of the last verse is my favorite: "Nowhere to gun and nowhere to go"?!?!
Gun rhymes with gone, like he's gone nowhere, but then of course, gunning being the only job he's ever really known beside working in a refinery or rotting in a penitentiary.
And of course, gun rhymes with run, and I've heard the Boss sing it as "run" before. But "gun" is better I think. It kind of sounds like "come" too, which screws with your brain when you hear "go" right after. And "gun" gives you a nice rhyme with "go" making the whole thing more true-feeling.

I'd like to re-record my version again some time.