The Heart Of Saturday Night: Day 6

Transportation Blues:

"Semi Suite" - First of all, pretty hilarious title for what is in reality a very bitter love song about a truck driver. Not, ultimately, a great song, but little bits of cleverness sprinkled throughout.

...followed by...

"Shiver Me Timbers" - a melancholy little ditty about sailing away from everything you ever blah blah blah. The distribution of nautical metaphors, references and puns reminds me of Zap Brannigan's theory of pick-up lines "Say as many of them as you can, as fast as you can"

...followed by...

"Diamond's on My Windshield" - A song about driving at night. Not as good a song as I had hoped but a few really nice moments: "The 8s go east and the 5s go north; merging exits back and forth" particularly.

...skipping ahead a few...

"Depot Depot" - a boozy tune about hanging out at the bus depot and having no place to go. More about waking up drunk in a bus depot than anything else. "I can't claim title to a single memory..."

This album has 11 songs and a solid 4 of them are clunkers about travel. Ok, 3.5, I still kind of like DoMW, but man those are Toby Keith album numbers. I know there's a reason that country and blues and R&B singers love "Ramblin' Men." The crazy backwardness of people who opt for a life of discomfort, who don't want to be loved by the people who love them and would prefer to jump from house to house, town to town, pier to pier, that's interesting stuff. And the stories are classics from both sides, the weird inner monologue of the rambler, the sad yet understanding lament of the housewife/daughter/son left behind. But this kind of sloppy execution, these half stories with little to no insight, just seems lazy:

"Hey, I'm working on this album about the underbelly of California on a Saturday night, but I'm a couple songs short"

"Shit man, right a song about travelers"

"I got a truck driver song on there already"

"So? What about cab drivers? Bus riders? Sailors? Just crazy dudes who drive around all night in the rain? Throw a sax solo on there and you're all set."

That is almost certainly incredibly unfair to the creative effort that went into the creation of this album. It comes from a time when TW was being called a beat poet, those wacky grass smokers who gave us the most famous road trip narrative since the Odyssey. The travelogue was certainly part of the aesthetic TW was cultivating for himself. That being said these are some of the worst songs on the album, and it's an album which if you took the best songs (which, incidentally are also the songs which stick closest to the thematic center of the 'Saturday Night' thing) you get a pretty awesome conceptual EP:

1. "New Coat of Paint"
2. "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"
3. "Please Call Me Baby"
4. "Drunk on The Moon"
5. "The Ghosts of Saturday Night"

Or maybe just a 3 song suite:

1. "New Coat of Paint"
2. "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"
3. "The Ghosts of Saturday Night"

Just my two cents.

Tomorrow: Wrap-up and a preview of Nighthawks at the Diner

-K