Talking Heads: Sand in the Vaseline- Popular Favorites (1975-1992)

(Sire)

RECOMMENDED

Sentiment alert: This two-disc career overview was, radio aside, my introduction to Talking Heads, a band that eclipses all others post-'60s for me. I could recount the moment in the middle of "Don't Worry About the Government" when I recognized that glimmer, that thrilling instant of discovery when I completely "got" what the band was about -- but really, so much of that will be covered when we discuss the individual albums. Being honest, I wouldn't any longer name this as the ideal way in to the Heads; its approach to their best albums is too haphazard, and the glut of material from their brief but wounding decline (would've been just a weak detour if they hadn't come to hate one another so much) is too much of a slog. If I were going to send a Talking Heads newbie to the proverbial record shop, I would point them in the direction of any of the three Eno-produced LPs plus the handy no-nonsense Rhino package The Best of Talking Heads. But Sand in the Vaseline, creepy title aside, is arguably as essential for harder core fans as the overhyped three-disc box Once in a Lifetime, and the Heads compile well, so that if this is the way you first come across the breadth of their catalog, it will undoubtedly intrigue you.

Not really a greatest-hits package per se, this is more comparable to the Beatles' Red and Blue albums in its mix of most (but not all) of the big singles, some band-beloved album tracks, and a few rarities. The content is sandwiched by eight previously unreleased or non-LP cuts, four at the beginning of disc one and the rest at the end of disc two, that remain the selling point for fans and will doubtless keep the set in rotation after its utility as a jukebox has passed.

There are two performances from pre-Jerry Harrison demo sessions. "Sugar on My Tongue" is archetypal, clipped punk-bubblegum, but "I Want to Live" is flat-out remarkable. Byrne puts in one of his most riveting performances, and in many ways "I've had some friends... but I want more" is a moment that defines the band. Incredibly, this rough early runthrough of an abandoned track is one of their most accomplished, compelling recorded moments. The band already has a distinctive sound as a three-piece; on "I Want to Live" especially, the slinking funk of Tina Weymouth's oddball bass line is evocative of things to come.

Vaseline provides the first CD release of Talking Heads' legendary debut single, "Love -> Building on Fire," never offered on a studio album. Byrne's already infectious drama and twitchy psychosis peak with his wild and possessed devotion to "two loves" (the most breathless line is listed on the web as "Count 'em: one, two loves" but I've always heard it as the more unhinged "God, I want two loves"). The major body of the song is in the "Don't Worry About the Government"-predicting obsessive-compulsive tracking of a six-degrees link described in the title. Love is his face, which is a building (!), which is on fire. Jerry Harrison has yet to arrive, so the sound is filled out with somewhat goofy horns, the sort of overly twee maneuver the Heads would passionately steer clear of on their debut album (demanding, as recounted in the liner notes, that cellos be removed from "Psycho Killer").

In a storied career spanning fifteen years on record, Talking Heads only technically had one non-album b-side, duly but somewhat awkwardly provided with a home on Sand in the Vaseline. "I Wish You Wouldn't Say That" hails from the sessions for Talking Heads '77 and is clearly among the lesser numbers produced then, though it would have fit reasonably well on the first half of that LP. The arrangement is weak compared to the crazed precision of 77 at its best, or the massiveness of the Eno recordings, but Byrne has never sounded scarier, more paranoid, or more impassioned -- his childlike, desperate "now Jimmy's coming over" still sends a few uncomfortable chills my way.

The Talking Heads odyssey truly begins with track five, "Psycho Killer," which spearheads the same comic, life-affirming anecdote described by Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense: the nervous nerd learning to loosen up and move his ass, and basically give in to the void. So he struggles to form the bizarre universe he inhabits into neat boxes, sometimes obsessive ("Psycho Killer"), sometimes wide-eyed and innocent ("Don't Worry About the Government"), sometimes outlandishly angry ("No Compassion"), but always self-denying and ingratiatingly crazed, weirdly glorious. Never has a drawn-out character study found such a warm and expressive home in rock & roll. It's easy to carp with the tracklist, of course, as how can "Uh-oh, Love Comes to Town" and "Pulled Up" really be left out of this odyssey, but 77 is still quite properly represented.

The same can't be said of the three albums to follow, the ones that unquestionably represent Talking Heads' peak -- and maybe Brian Eno's. But the thing is, you should own them anyway, so why does it matter? More Songs About Buildings and Food is the band's expansive, assured masterpiece, one of the rare times in history when a fabulous group at the initial rush of its greatest creativity has been captured in full by a brilliant renegade producer sympathetic to and cognizant of their power. It's not that "Warning Sign" isn't great, it's that More Songs contains all of the original Heads material that made them such a hot attraction at CBGB and was held off from their first record until they met up with a more ideal producer. Eno rammed unheard-of electricity and mystery into "Stay Hungry," "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel," "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls," and "Found a Job" -- in his hands, the band was permitted to sound as stomping and enormous as they were. "Warning Sign" is marginal stuff compared to those live killers. Of course the surprisingly reverent, sweet-natured take on Al Green's "Take Me to the River," their first stroke with mainstream success, has to be here, so Vaseline gets points for including the band's greatest song ever, never a hit or even a single, "The Big Country" -- an impossibly articulate ode to alienation and depression that I've been telling people for years now is my choice for best ballad in rock & roll. I don't think I'm wrong. The complexity of emotions when David Byrne slips into gibberish in the end makes this the "Waterloo Sunset" for those of us too young and cynical for "Waterloo Sunset" to mean as much as "Dead End Street" did.

In tackling Fear of Music, Vaseline weirdly skips its signature "Life During Wartime" (but offers a bad edit of the Stop Making Sense rendition on disc two), replacing it with "Memories Can't Wait," an excellent and completely uncommercial, eccentric song that under no circumstances belongs on a greatest hits package. "Heaven" -- the record's most reassuring moment, which is amazing considering how bleak it is -- and "I Zimbra" are crucial. So the biggest gaffe is only allowing two songs from Remain in Light, the album for which the band will surely be remembered, both of which the prospective buyer is nearly guaranteed to have already heard ("Once in a Lifetime" and "Crosseyed and Painless") -- the same weird error Allen Klein made when only offering two Revolver cuts on The Beatles 1962-1966. And all, it would seem, in the interest of dividing the story in half between the increasingly abstract progression of the band through their commercial peak in 1983, and the rootsy slickness that came to preoccupy them starting in the mid-'80s.

Speaking in Tongues is not nearly as difficult a record to pare down as its predecessors, so offering "Burning Down the House" (their biggest hit, maybe?), "Swamp" (David Byrne's cattiest rant), and "This Must Be the Place" (the Heads' only love song) is logical enough. Then an inviting detour into Stop Making Sense, then we arrive at the band's return from synthpop and polyrhythm and get to study what exactly ripped them apart.

Losing Eno -- or getting rid of Eno, rather -- was probably not much help, but Speaking in Tongues did continue to show a sure-footed band, particularly coming along after a three-year hiatus. The reboot Little Creatures is the band's finest non-Eno moment, but it marked the first signs of a sharp decline in commercial fortunes. A key to this: Whoever chose the leading singles from each of the last three Talking Heads albums was clearly out of their mind. Creatures, an album whose dark subject matter was hidden by musical levity, was anticipated by "The Lady Don't Mind," the subtlest, most low-key track on an album overstuffed with pop hooks. It came equipped with a Jim Jarmusch-directed video, even. But it isn't even acknowledged as a Popular Favorite here, replaced by three subsequent and better-received singles (hymnal "Road to Nowhere," silly and disturbing "Stay Up Late," powerfully surrendering "And She Was"). Preceding the following year's True Stories, a flawed but brilliant film tie-in, was the Heads' worst and most grating single, "Wild, Wild Life." And if you had been considering giving up on America's greatest band since the Velvet Underground, "Blind" -- the promo for their final LP, Naked -- couldn't have changed your mind, with its hamhanded video, politely painful horns, and Byrne's ridiculously inexpressive caterwauling.

Little Creatures was far friendlier than "The Lady Don't Mind" suggested, and while hardly its siblings in quality, the last two records certainly weren't as awful as those songs indicate. Vaseline would seem an ideal opportunity to delve more seriously into the 1985-88 material to ward off suspicions about it and maybe get a few more people interested in those twilight-period efforts. There is, after all, plenty of room, since we squeezed the bulk of the band's career onto one disc already. Alas, we get just three songs from each of these albums. "City of Dreams" isn't a terrible choice for an album track from True Stories, but there were better ones ("People Like Us," "Dream Operator," and where is the charming single "Radio Head"?), and instead of the delightful "Mommy, Daddy, You and I" (casting Byrne, like "Found a Job" a decade earlier, as a punk-rock Shel Silverstein) or bracing "The Democratic Circus," Naked offers the weightless, inconsequential "Mr. Jones," whose Muzak trumpets seem only to serve the worst prejudices about what's wrong with Naked.

If side projects (mostly excellent ones, which put them in an unusual position) and a dooming sense of impending repetition seem to have hurt Talking Heads, and if Sand in the Vaseline fails to give serious lie to the concept, it also offers a counterargument in the form of "Sax and Violins," a holdover from the Naked sessions ultimately completed and used for Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World in 1991 that suggests both everything the final album could and should have been, and the splendidly evocative direction they might have taken if not for the now-crippling acrimony that destroyed them the year this compilation was issued. It integrates its West African influences and international army of musicians with a sense of beauty and assurance almost entirely missing from Naked, the best moments of which are its simplest; on "Sax and Violins," the Heads reacquaint themselves with the sound of mass unification that made Stop Making Sense such a moving experience -- people gather to play and chant and sing in the service of a simple romantic message. That is the notion of Talking Heads I wish could've lived into the '90s, and it seems as though they were conscious of this, only a bit too late -- just a tantalizingly tiny bit too late. (And not that anyone remembers, but "Sax and Violins" was also a surprisingly sizable radio hit.)

The chronology of all this is hard to suss out, but before David Byrne's bandmates learned of their breakup from an interview in a newspaper, they managed to finish a new song that's included here. The very last Talking Heads track completed, "Gangster of Love" uses some interesting sampling techniques (integrating a drum loop from the Remain in Light period) but is little more than a loopy slow-jam in the end that fails to go much of anywhere despite its infectious bassline and ghostly backing vocals. It's not nearly the soaring, disarming swansong "Sax and Violins" could've been.

Though newly released as a single in 1992, "Lifetime Piling Up" -- a pandering new-song-for-a-best-of title if ever there was one -- is a Naked outtake and rises above that album's dregs only through Byrne's amusing lyrics and the celebratory, catchy chorus. Vaseline closes with the Speaking in Tongues reject "Popsicle," a fun and mildly sexy bit of radio pop that was overhauled to become "Walk It Down" on Little Creatures -- but one wishes they'd found a way to appropriate Byrne's fantastic "gimme gimme gimme" and "summertime, boy" hooks someplace, as they sound like they belong on your FM dial.

Sand in the Vaseline deserves high praise for one thing, surely: the best liner notes for any release I've ever bought. Good Lord, they're fantastic. Lavishly and cleverly illustrated with picture sleeves, bootlegs, rare band photographs, and, especially unmissable, a bombastic anonymous note sent to the band in the mid-'70s, the two booklets contain interesting band comments for every track. Plus, each member of the band contributes an essay, all funny and observant, with only Byrne's drug rant seeming a bit aloof, and he makes up for it with a "Talking Heads FAQ" almost as deadpan funny as his promotional "David Byrne Interviews David Byrne" featurette. This package was obviously a labor of love, twice as impressive for a band that had just called it quits.

Again, although I think the Heads would be better served with a simpler way in, I'd consider this an essential package (much better than the Rhino boxed set), and you will fall in love with the band; I certainly did. If you love them already, you need "Sax and Violins" and "I Want to Live," and the other new ones out of sheer curiosity. Plus those goddamn booklets, seriously. Troll your local used bins now.

[Heavily expanded from a review posted at d-b.com in 2004.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Bonus Rarities & Outtakes (1975-92)

Toro Y Moi: Underneath the Pine (2011)

(Carpark)

Chaz Bundick can really sing; his voice is a soothing combination of surfer casual and weighty soul that sounds as good when softly intoning as when wordlessly wailing. Bundick can also craft some solid keyboard and toy piano trills that can occasionally provide a bit of gentle beauty or impressive atmosphere. (I advise new agers in need to take "Before I'm Done" and "Elise" to yoga class.)

What he's missing, then, are songs. That's not to say there's nothing here you can learn to hum to yourself with a little practice, and maybe there are a couple of hooks that will make their way into the summer's musical vocabulary. But mark my words, there aren't many, and Bundick's melodies tend to wander off in clipped, incomplete directions like the worst psychedelia. Indeed, he could score with an Ariel Pink sort of flukish style-play if his fixation were with the kind of music he's writing.

Instead, he shares the odd obsession of many concurrent songwriters with AM Gold soft rock of the Carter and Reagan administrations. Whereas Ariel Pink approaches his genre lifts with an attractive outrageousness and Twin Shadow and elder statesman Dan Bejar of Destroyer utilize this music, once the antithesis of college rock, as a springboard for their idiosyncratic songwriting, Bundick can't seem to get past just wanting his stuff to feel like something you'd have heard on the radio after midnight in a certain period. His approach is clinical, weirdly seductionless, and stripping Hall & Oates of their ham-handed sensuality (brash and sexist though they may ultimately have been) really leaves nothing at all worth mentioning. I'm told there's something here, and the supergross cover certainly suggests a far more interesting artist than the one I seem to be hearing, but this delicate, pleasant stuff puts me right to sleep.

Aesop Rock: Labor Days (2001)

(Definitive Jux)

RECOMMENDED

I'm having trouble thinking of an individual story better-told, in any branch of pop music, than this album's "No Regrets," a shattering tale of love and art and satisfied death. I suppose we could delve into the Kinks' catalog and find some intricate character study like "Two Sisters" but who but Aesop Rock has ever thrown the words together in such a thrillingly precise, unfussy but eloquent manner?

That's one of the tracks when you can figure out what the hell he's talking about (the direct, perhaps overdramatic Clashism "9-5ers Anthem" is another example); after spending a few days with this in the car wondering whether it would be worthwhile to decipher enough of it to write intelligently about Aesop's fixations, I determined that it would be a futile gesture, unless I really need to work enough out of his Nazi and Justice League and Kraftwerk and refs to provide a commentary that won't say nearly as much as this wordy, complex music.

Aesop Rock is hardly a hip hop master; his delivery lacks emotional variance and often feels rote, or slavish to the material he recites. Still, not many rappers can compete with either the conceptual ambition of this record, worthy of Kanye West, or its working-class solidarity, worthy of the Roots or, hell, the Pogues. If you're looking for an incredibly dense, musically intriguing, smartly flowing record to keep you busy parsing out its ideas and thrusts for a good long while, this literate and fascinating cult moment should be near the top of your list. There's plenty of brainpower and funk in this hour of interjections and loops; it's pretty damn funny, too. "If the revolution ain't gonna be televised, then fuck, I prob'ly missed it."

Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place (2011)

(Asthmatic Kitty)

More than twenty years after her breakthrough Watermark, Enya is still going at it, crafting overelaborate but sleepy atmospheres tha-- huh? Who? Are you serious? Well, fuck. Sorry.

John Coltrane: Giant Steps (1960)

(Atlantic)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

When someone in the audience at a recent Cat's Cradle show requested his unreleased Coltrane love letter "My Favorite Things," John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats politely complied then told the story, and I'm paraphrasing, of how everyone when they're somewhere between 18 and 23 discovers John Coltrane and believes in their heart of hearts that they are the first person ever to realize how amazing he is, to revel in the joy of growing into an appreciation of someone so unassumingly brilliant, so high-art, so wise and eclectic beyond what even the most artful among us can hope to achieve in our lifetimes, much less in the forty years he was afforded.

But this extended communal experience, clichéd and familiar as it is, speaks to a common truth -- that to have something this beautiful and so seemingly exotic fall into place is really an amazing thing, a wonderful part of a human and musical appreciation we all deserve to run through. And once we get there, we can start to relate to how much fucking fun and joy there is in Giant Steps.

As with so many before me, my relationship with jazz, or at least hard bop and modal jazz, began with Miles Davis -- who is considerably easier to get to know and love than Trane for a teenager used to considering everything within a rock idiom. Kind of Blue was the first purely jazz record I owned, purchased in a moment of the sort of aimless curiosity I like to think has served me well in life. And Kind of Blue isn't such a big stretch for any human being to understand, its sad textures and ample grooves as clear-cut and deceptively straightforward as the hooks on a Beach Boys LP. Above all, its emotions are direct; it's never a struggle to follow the drift of feeling in any of those six cuts.

I couldn't help noticing how much Coltrane's sax throttled me when it came into focus on "So What," and of course his name was familiar, though I never learned about him school (even though I'm from his home state and he is the greatest cultural asset we've ever had, but that's another rant for another day). Several months after Kind of Blue, I got Giant Steps. Man, I want to tell you it blew my eighteen year-old mind and changed my life forever, but I didn't really get it. Certainly not on the level that I got Kind of Blue. And I'm going to sound like an asshole but I'm pretty sure it's because I was a kid, and if Giant Steps -- if Coltrane in general -- is about anything, I can't say what it is exactly but it isn't something we know when we're eighteen. In Stephin Merritt's phrase, it's about things we're all too young to know.

It's not that Kind of Blue is from the heart and Giant Steps isn't; it's that Steps' pathway to the senses is more cerebral, less sensuous than spiritual -- but busily, brightly so. Recorded within three weeks of one another in what must be among the most productive months of recording any American musician has managed, the two records are cut from a common cloth but couldn't finally be more different. Steps is "hard bop" from its first few seconds, when furious chord changes beyond my human comprehension fly past Coltrane and band, who proceed so nonchalantly it's rather startling. To put this record on is to feel you are bursting into a gathering in process, a world of high traffic that never began and never will end. Perversely, the songs, "Giant Steps" itself in particular, approach their chaos in a casual, threateningly clean-cut manner that may come off as detached to the newcomer, diluted by none of the aural comforts and explicit shadings of an "All Blues."

Of course, Coltrane is anything but detached and that would always be the case; his stated desire to record great meadows of happiness and button-pushing emotion for his listeners still lay ahead. Even though Giant Steps post-dates the great revelation he credited for altering his musical course, its approach is worlds more impressionistic and streamlined than his second greatest recording, A Love Supreme. It's fitting that, in part presumably as a result of his grand experiments with Miles Davis, Giant Steps would prove his final session before a world-shaking immersion in modal jazz.

We can spend all day reading about bebop and Coltrane changes, and struggling with the implications of the word "modal," and those of us without the head or ears for it will quickly collapse in frustration. I can only explain in barest of terms what I love, what I find so difficult and moving about something like "Cousin Mary" -- its conflict and propulsion, its cheery street corner madness. Innovative it may be, but it's the strange itching and drama that strikes me in "Countdown," and it's the bustling urban confusion in "Spiral," an almost over-the-top evocation of sprawl and the wet paved midnight Sweet Smell of Success alleyways just as intoxicatingly captured by Television's Marquee Moon. It's the lonely shades of militaristic duty on "Syeeda's Song Flute" before it degenerates into almost unbearably heavy bass cycles just before Coltrane returns with the most beautiful and searing sequence of the album.

But I can't attest to any of this being valid for anyone else; truthfully, by now the pleasures come immediately and require no twisting. What is certain about the appeal of Giant Steps, never suggested by its peacefully impassioned cover, are its vague running commentary on a debilitating, scarcely acknowledged chaos brewing underneath it, the quiet but unmistakable prelude to Coltrane's 1960s. More directly approachable and striking is the manner in which Trane's rapid-fire solos, so crazed that pianist Tommy Flanagan occasionally seems to lose his grip, bounce against the sweetly urbane, melancholy melodies of his compositions -- a fascinating contrast easy for a new jazz fan reared on rock & roll to get behind -- as though he is proceeding with business but periodically slipping into an alien trance. Coltrane's professionalism and the careful construction of emotional rise-and-fall in his music are stunning, and it's a thrill to hear his rational side slip unwarned into gorgeous, effortless flight on every track.

I can tell you how Giant Steps fell into place for me. For someone who's always listened to jazz, this likely won't make much sense, but I never really had. It's different now, but when I was in my early twenties I needed something to signify to make me enjoy a piece of music, something more than virtuosic solos and arranged prettiness or falling-apart sheets of sound. I was researching the Hamlet chicken plant fire, an ugly incident that took place in North Carolina in September of 1991. A company called Imperial Foods with a poor safety record had an unfortunate habit of locking the emergency exit doors at its plant, based on a paranoia that their predominately black, poor workforce would rob them of some of their rotten chicken parts. On September 3rd, a hydraulic line burst near a gigantic deep fryer. 25 people were killed, most of them trapped inside the cooler or by the locked doors. In crime scene photos of the doors you can see the fingernail marks of people desperately trying to escape before the smoke killed them. Less soul-crushing but no less sad and disturbing are the photos taken a decade later, days before the remains of the plant were finally torn down, depicting an idly overrun scene of misery, its bent metallic quiet unmistakably an aftermath of horror no novelist could grasp long enough to invent. In the prior few years, the survivors who did not subsequently succumb to their injuries mostly -- too poor to leave Hamlet -- lived within sight of the plant, reminded every day.

John Coltrane was born in Hamlet sixty-five years before that. On a tape I found from a public TV station regarding the tenth anniversary of the incident, "Naima" from Giant Steps -- recorded at a different session than the other tracks, softer and more deliberate, full of ache in Coltrane's stark playing and the tolling of Paul Chambers' bass -- was laid over a grim montage of the town of Hamlet in the years after the fire, a community forever shadowed, every loss and inescapable disappointment apparent in the faces of those nearby. I was haunted but somehow failed to recognize the music. When I learned of its identity, I was taken aback and something led me to grow addicted to the immense sadness, desperation, loneliness of the song. It was written for Coltrane's wife at the time but the Hamlet video threw me for a loop with the realization that the crux of it was not any particular lovelorn or lost melancholy or dread but the sheer essence of a loss, perfectly and flawlessly expressed. It soon hit me emotionally, every time, with no photos or associations attached beyond what rise it could get from me. And within five years or so it was, roughly speaking, the greatest recording, the greatest song of any kind I knew of. I still think it is.

And then the reason to hear Giant Steps again became "Naima" and what longings it could conjure up, because there is always longing no matter how good of a place we're in. We know that as well as Coltrane did, but we can't do what he did with it. And then after that the reason becomes how good it feels to have the tenor sax blasting in your eardrum (what a terrific album for headphones this is), and then the reason is to visit that strange ornately captured dirty-town urban mystery, all business and secrets. The reason for me is never just musical sophistication. But fuck, any reason to listen to this is a good one.

Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx: We're New Here (2011)

(XL)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

No, it's no match for I'm New Here, a minimal masterwork of a record that will be remembered as sealing Gil Scott-Heron's legacy forever. But as remix albums go, this is really odd and special. Do take a look, and dig particularly the astoundingly gorgeous / groovy "My Cloud," the standout of the selections here that dip into Gil's catalog but coalesce lovingly with the reflection-on-chaos of I'm New Here.

Taj Mahal: Best Of (1967-74)

(Columbia)

RECOMMENDED

Admission: I'd no idea who Taj Mahal was until I heard his throttling version of "Stagger Lee" on a compilation of murder ballads. This is embarrassing, but I had to try for years before blues appreciation sprang up in me, and even then (and now) I have a bit of trouble with modern-ish blues such as Mahal's. And some of this music, like the opening slog through "Statesboro Blues" and the ridiculous whistle-jam "Ain't Gwine to Whistle DixieAnymo'" fails to challenge my prejudices about the worst rote excesses of the blues of the last forty years or so.

But to my surprise, Mahal is more warmth than slickness; there is real low-key beauty to most of these songs: the casually lovely "Leaving Trunk," the spiritual "Farther on Down the Road," the wondrous take on Goffin/King's "Take a Giant Step." Some of it is Mahal's impressive guitar work, but the lion's share of his work's appeal is his gruff but sentimental voice, which overcomes even the most simplistic arrangements and overly polished production work. And by "You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond" and the utterly affirming "Cakewalk into Town" (2.5 minutes of bliss, with horns), it's not just the blooze jockeys he's won over.

As a compilation, I can't speak to this disc's breadth since it's my first exposure to the material, but I can say that its narrative drift makes it extraordinarily easy to get to know. The emotional connection might peak somewhere around "Six Days on the Road," a travel anthem without rawk bullshit, but the biggest surprise is "Fishin' Blues," a musically sneaky, lyrically hilarious fuckaround about fishing with your woman, or something, as great as Hank Locklin's "We're Gonna Go Fishin'" but more intentionally funny. And, as dumb as it sounds, realer in some strange way.