Longing for the day ...

Maccas' Drive Through Blues

It's a wonderful exercise for an artist to deconstruct the works of the great artists. It's also a dangerous practice to re-write them into a modern scenario - it can leave to some completely inappropriate outcomes. Nonetheless, this is what I have ended up doing to Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.

I was playing with it and trying to work out exactly how a country sound had been applied to a 12-bar blues pattern - that's a neat trick I thought I might want to deploy at some stage in my own writing. Unfortunately, it was stuck in my head the next morning when I went to get myself a coffee from McDonald's. Our local McDonald's is notoriously slow with coffee orders and I was keen to resume my songwriting exercises ... so the line "I'm stuck in Macca's drive through" replaced "I'm stuck in Folsom Prison".

This unfortunately happens to me sometimes and it immediately opened up all sorts of metaphorical parallels in my head. I decided the idea was too good not to finish, so I did. Getting very excited and wanting to practice making social media content, I made this somewhat premature video announcing the song to the world:

Now, that was an OK first draft and reached 866 people, who reacted 55 times and 5 people shared the post. It grabbed 338 views for a total of 171 minutes at the time of writing. That's an average of 16 seconds per view ... wait, what?? The talking at the start goes for 32 seconds ... so most people never even got to the song?

<Sigh> So! I resolved to re-write (I'm not happy with some of the lyrics - they could be neater and more pointed) and record ... produce a song video. Determined NOT to do a lyric video for ths one. Might have to enlist my daughter to help shoot some footage at the local Maccas ... more on that later.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments below ...