Track list commentary
1) Paratai Drive
This was the last song written and recorded for this album. It stems from a true story involving my wife and I and a finance company. My wife thought we should heed the advice of the business pages of all the newspapers and diversify our savings so we invested in . . . a reputable company that advertised on TV. After we were informed the company had changed its name we became suspicious and resolved to take the money out at the earliest date. We did. It fell over two weeks later trapping the funds of innumerable mum and dad investors. Part of our suspicion rested on net research that divulged how much the directors were paying themselves. Since then we?ve seen the same thing with Madoff, Stanford et al. The 40K hookers on Wall Street came from a Fox News broadcast in September 08 (I think) just before the stock market crash. I remember fondly one of the female anchors on Fox praising their entrepreneurship.
Anyway that was the background to the content. The impetus to write it (I might not have done so otherwise) stemmed from a TV 3 news item, about a finance company delivering an address to stakeholders who had lost their money. The company director gave a b-grade acting performance like he was a victim in all this too, though the second half of the item cut away to builders continuing work on his mansion on . . . you can guess the rest. If anyone knows of anyone who got wiped out in the collapse of the various finance companies last year please alert them to the existence of this song. It won?t get their money back, but the truthfulness of it might console them somewhat.
2) The Situation is Hopeless (not serious)
This was originally recorded for Potboiler but withdrawn because we fucked it up somewhat. It was written in 1999 (to my best recollection) so the fires in the night refer not to Victoria but Malaysia or maybe Indonesia (where at the time they were burning forest for agriculture such that the city residents were choking on the smoke). As I think I said in the press release the song is sadly more relevant now than it was then.
3) Paraphrasing Hitler
I began writing the lyrics for this in late 2007 and slowly worked both the music and lyrics up through early 2008. It takes as its starting premise an episode of the documentary series The World at War dealing with the entrapped sixth army at Stalingrad and Hitler?s response to the plight of those 150,000 souls at Christmas 1943. In comparing the Bush administration to Hitler?s I can do no better than to reproduce the conclusion of a seminar I delivered in February 2009 featuring this song.
In summation, an unwavering faith in technological warfare, an ideology based on the notion of predetermination, a penchant for misleading dialects disseminated by a government/corporate controlled media to disguise violent actions combined with highly censored media coverage of foreign military adventures in the pursuit of oil. Which of the two administrations am I talking about?
Canadian writer and thinker John Ralston Saul writing as far back as 1993 wrote in his book Voltaire?s Bastards the following:
?There is in the late twentieth century a general feeling that Hitler?and perhaps Stalin, although people in the West feel no personal need to take him into account?was an accident of history. He caught us off guard, but we recovered in time to meet this force of evil in combat. Now he is gone. A horrible aberration. It isn?t surprising that no one wants to hold on to the memory of Hitler as an image of modern normalcy. But if this is still the Age of Reason and if Hitler is the great image of reason?s dark side, then he is still very much with us.?
This was the last song written and recorded for this album. It stems from a true story involving my wife and I and a finance company. My wife thought we should heed the advice of the business pages of all the newspapers and diversify our savings so we invested in . . . a reputable company that advertised on TV. After we were informed the company had changed its name we became suspicious and resolved to take the money out at the earliest date. We did. It fell over two weeks later trapping the funds of innumerable mum and dad investors. Part of our suspicion rested on net research that divulged how much the directors were paying themselves. Since then we?ve seen the same thing with Madoff, Stanford et al. The 40K hookers on Wall Street came from a Fox News broadcast in September 08 (I think) just before the stock market crash. I remember fondly one of the female anchors on Fox praising their entrepreneurship.
Anyway that was the background to the content. The impetus to write it (I might not have done so otherwise) stemmed from a TV 3 news item, about a finance company delivering an address to stakeholders who had lost their money. The company director gave a b-grade acting performance like he was a victim in all this too, though the second half of the item cut away to builders continuing work on his mansion on . . . you can guess the rest. If anyone knows of anyone who got wiped out in the collapse of the various finance companies last year please alert them to the existence of this song. It won?t get their money back, but the truthfulness of it might console them somewhat.
2) The Situation is Hopeless (not serious)
This was originally recorded for Potboiler but withdrawn because we fucked it up somewhat. It was written in 1999 (to my best recollection) so the fires in the night refer not to Victoria but Malaysia or maybe Indonesia (where at the time they were burning forest for agriculture such that the city residents were choking on the smoke). As I think I said in the press release the song is sadly more relevant now than it was then.
3) Paraphrasing Hitler
I began writing the lyrics for this in late 2007 and slowly worked both the music and lyrics up through early 2008. It takes as its starting premise an episode of the documentary series The World at War dealing with the entrapped sixth army at Stalingrad and Hitler?s response to the plight of those 150,000 souls at Christmas 1943. In comparing the Bush administration to Hitler?s I can do no better than to reproduce the conclusion of a seminar I delivered in February 2009 featuring this song.
In summation, an unwavering faith in technological warfare, an ideology based on the notion of predetermination, a penchant for misleading dialects disseminated by a government/corporate controlled media to disguise violent actions combined with highly censored media coverage of foreign military adventures in the pursuit of oil. Which of the two administrations am I talking about?
Canadian writer and thinker John Ralston Saul writing as far back as 1993 wrote in his book Voltaire?s Bastards the following:
?There is in the late twentieth century a general feeling that Hitler?and perhaps Stalin, although people in the West feel no personal need to take him into account?was an accident of history. He caught us off guard, but we recovered in time to meet this force of evil in combat. Now he is gone. A horrible aberration. It isn?t surprising that no one wants to hold on to the memory of Hitler as an image of modern normalcy. But if this is still the Age of Reason and if Hitler is the great image of reason?s dark side, then he is still very much with us.?
