I was in California this past weekend so I could attend the Durango Songwriters Expo near Santa Barbara. It's a big conference with various workshops and meet-and-greets where songwriters can mingle with industry people who may or may not be looking for music to place in their movies/television shows/commercials/video games, etc. etc.., and let me tell you something; these guys can be tough. Upon having this song reviewed by one of the 'professionals' there, I was told that I should never play it in public because it makes me sound "pathetic". Oh well.., I'm still proud of it anyway. Let me know what you think.

Well, it looks like I won't have my new belated Valentines day love song ready for several weeks now, because I've been very busy with my new career as a... Oh, I'm too excited, I can't say it... Okay, here it goes... My new career as a DISHWASHER/BUS-BOY!!! YES!!!
Let me tell you about it. I walk up to people while they're eating their food in a restaurant and say, "Hello, my name is Ian, and I'll be your bus boy this evening. Let me tell you some of my specials: Tonight I'll be taking your dirty knives, forks, wine glasses, and mangled straw wrappers. Can I start you off by taking away your dirty salad plates?" But the fun doesn't stop there. After I remove their soiled utensils, I actually get to take them back to the kitchen and WASH them! Woo-hoo! And I don't feel the least bit shameful of the fact that this the exact same thing I was doing when I was a teenager. (Is the facetious tone coming through here?) Hey. You gotta do what you gotta do. So, appropriately for this week's blog entry, I have a song called 'Bus Boy Blues' that I wrote when I was doing the same thing I'm doing now years ago in Philadelphia.

Okay. To all my fans out there, (even if there's only one of you at this point,) I'm sorry I'm late with this week's blog entry. I've been recording a new song I wrote that would have been perfect for Valentines day, but I just couldn't get it done in time. So instead, here's a fun, all-instrumental, little diddy I wrote several years ago that reminds me of something you might have heard on the Benny Hill show- or even during one of those .."Let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby.." cartoons they used to play during intermission at the movies. Either way, it works nicely as this week's late entry to tie you over until I finish recording the song I originally wanted to post- which should be completed in time for next week's blog. Stay tuned...

I've always loved those clever plays on words you sometimes see on TV or in movies. For example, the guns and ammo store on the Simpsons is called "Blood Bath and Beyond". In the video game, Grand Theft Auto, there are movie posters around town advertising a porno called 'Saturday Night Beaver". That's funny, right?
I love giving some of my songs the same witty twist on familiar sayings or titles. I already had the title for this song picked out long before I even wrote the song itself. I figured that if a 'social' butterfly is someone who hangs out and gets along with everybody, then we can assume that an 'antisocial' butterfly is pretty much a slightly humorous way of describing a loner, (which I pretty much am.)
Anyway, I ended up writing and recording this song, and I was so proud of it. Then, just for the hell of it, I decided to actually look up the word 'antisocial'. And guess what.. It's NOT the opposite of 'social.' The word 'antisocial' actually describes a hostile and disruptive person often involved in criminal behavior. Now what was I going to do? I really didn't want to go back and completely rewrite the song, so I decided to just leave it alone and let it simply rewrite itself. Once I knew what 'antisocial' really meant, the song suddenly took on an entirely different meaning for me. Now give it a listen and decide what it means to you. And don't tell me it sucks, or I'll display some of my antisocial behavior towards you.

It just occurred to me that I'm always in a state of discomfort, but I seem to be
comfortable there. Yet, in order to motivate myself, I have to leave that comfort zone. And that's a problem, because as soon as I leave my comfort zone of uncomfortableness, it completely defeats the purpose because I'm automatically transported back to a place of comfort because I'm just so damn comfortable being uncomfortable. Finally, I decided to hell with trying to find my comfort zone. I'll just find my happy place. Now the problem with that is I'm always so sad when I'm there, but it saddens me to leave it because it's my happy place. Anyway, this song is called Happy Place. I wrote it while I was in my comfort zone of uncomfortableness, and I'm very happy with it.., which makes me sad.

As a songwriter, I'm always looking for inspiration. Sometimes I find it, sometimes I don't. I currently have literally hundreds of song/melody ideas in my head just waiting for the right story to inspire me to convert it into lyrics. I had the entire structure/melody completely written for this one, but the lyrics were lame- something to do with love and she left me or some humdrum topic like that. Then my uncle, who was living in San Francisco at the time, told me that he got a job managing an apartment building at 1800 Pacific Avenue, and if I wanted to see what it looked like then I should rent the movie, Days of Wine and Roses because part of it was filmed there. So I rented the movie. It's about an alcoholic who slowly gets his teetotaling wife addicted to booze so they can share his "passion" together. Needless to say, I found the inspiration I was looking for. Here's 'Stranger'.

Ah yes.., an old fashioned American love story... About two bandit/murderers. Let's see; Boy meets girl. Girl writes poems. Boy convinces girl to help him rob banks. Girl thinks this is a good idea, and they live happpily ever after before being perforated by a five minute, tommy-gun cartridge-emptying session. Works for me. They say that fact is stranger than fiction, and this would be a pretty boring script if it weren't true. Case in point: The movie, Bonnie and Clyde, won several acadamy awards. Natural Born Killers didn't. I wrote this song after seeing a documentary on the infamous couple. Now they've inspired a Broadway play and even a Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor. Nah, I'm just kidding about that last part.

I figure after the heaviness of last week's topic, I'd blog about a song of mine that carries a little less weight. It's a tongue-in-cheek ditty about taking one's temper out on the one's they love the most. And yes, it's based on someone I know... Or should I say, an amalgam of people I know. You know the kind.., everything under the sun is a major drama, and since you've already established yourself as their means of support, they feel they can lean on you in any way and at any time they please until you just collapse from the weight. So therefore, I'm talking about something even heavier than last week's topic. I can't win.
Anyway, the song is called Nobody Knows My Pain, and it's the seventh song off of my album, Diary of a Blue Collar Cracker, which was released in 2010 under my band name, Working Class Hussys. You can either buy the album online, or be cheap, (don't feel bad... I would be too) and just wait until I release the songs piecemeal via this blog.

This is my song about white flight in Trenton, NJ.


Whiter Shades Of Trash Video

Okay. So I live in Nashville now, but I grew up in and around the capitol city of Trenton, New Jersey. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Trenton, it's in old factory town situated along the banks of the Deleware River, conveniently located between New York City and Philadelphia. But in the decade before I was born, most of Trenton went from being an industrial metropolis to a run-down, poverty-stricken, crime-ridden and segregated vestige of its former self.

This city, which was the sight of one of the most important battles of the American revolution, would spend much of the 19th and 20th centuries helping to actually build the rest of the country. It was once home to a large textile, pottery, and ceramics industry, and a major manufacturing center for rubber and cigars. It's where bridge-builder John Roebling, who designed and oversaw the construction of New York's Brooklyn Bridge had his wire rope factory. And it was that factory in Trenton that produced the steel cables that support the spans of the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, among many others. It's also where inventor and philanthropist Peter Cooper, who founded the Cooper Union School for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York's Cooper Square had his Trenton Iron Company which built the largest rolling mill in the country for producing railroad iron.

But by the middle of the twentieth century, Trenton, along with so many other cities across the United States, fell victim to.., among other things.., changing economics, a lack of planning, poor leadership and corruption, as well as bad, old fashioned racism. The country's gradual decline from being an unparalleled economic and industrial power was spearheaded by a need for cheaper labor and products from abroad, which in turn also led many African American families from the south to northern cities like Trenton in search of jobs. The cruel irony is that as more black families arrived, the more white families left for the suburbs, bringing their industries and jobs with them.

Finally, some people credit the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.- which spawned major rioting throughout the city- as driving the final nail into its coffin, ultimately sealing its fate as a neglected urban center and giving it the reputation of a scary and extremely violent place to visit. Someone once said that America is the only country in the world that builds great cities and then runs away from them.

Of course, I'm only giving you my own perspective on this subject. I'm sure that most of it's denizens today view Trenton simply as home. But as a white kid who spent most of his life growing up in the suburbs- a result of my own family's participation in the 'white flight' migration- I was told not to go there. So I didn't... Until recently.
A friend of mine opened a bookstore called 'Classics' on Warren street where the locals go to every Friday night to play Scrabble, Chess, and board games, or to simply just hang out and socialize. I've met some of the nicest people anywhere there, and you can't help but wonder what the hell everyone was running from nearly half of a century ago. It proves just how devastating an emotion like fear can be. Anyway, this inspired me to write a song called Whiter Shades of Trash, which I also shot a video for- some of which was filmed on location at the bookstore. I hope you like it.