Evergreen

Here it is, the finished version of the song I described on Thursday:

Sempreverde

Sorry, this track is no longer available. Please buy the CD when it comes out!

As before, it's a dollar if you like and keep the download. A small price to pay for peace of mind! (Caution: This song might cause irregular heartbeat, anxiety or insomnia in some people. Always follow the directions printed on the packet and if necessary consult a doctor.)

Sempreverde

The man from the north enters the tube
Wriggles his way to the perspex cube
The man from the south dissolves in his mouth
A lozenge of Sempreverde

The man from the north and the man from the south
One by the brain, one by the mouth
Climb through the tube into the cube
Of the perspex Japanese garden

And in the pines a tiny sun shines
Birds small as insects fly through the air
The panda unzips the skin of a pig
Flops himself down in the garden

Fiddle me blank, fiddle me blind
All the young girls fiddle their minds
Jilly and Debbie and everyone's here
All for the Sempreverde

Giants and fairies and strange effigies
Sacred and artificial trees
Dragons and serpents and fish and birds
In the perspex Japanese garden

Otto the rich, Otto the poor
Spilling the stuff on the party floor
The past is so sad, the present is worse
Thank heaven we haven't a future

The world fills with trash and eskimo ash
Clouds of white gas floating in from the past
Crawl to the cashpoint, bring me the cash
And I'll get you the Sempreverde

I said 'I'm going to rape you'
She said okay
I said 'Don't say okay because then it's not rape'
She said 'Okay, I won't say okay'
On two tabs of Sempreverde

Evergreen Sempreverde

*

The current lead story on Salon is Irresistible Force, an interview with Stephin Merritt on the eve of the release of the new Magnetic Fields album, 'i'. Merritt is now giving interview with the deft, morose panache of Morrissey in his prime, so it's well worth having to sit through a Last Samurai infomercial to get to the meat of it... er, sorry, the veg. And, proving that my stock is higher in the East Village than in Clerkenwell, I did not go unmentioned (in a context which, you will see, also relates to this new song):

'Merritt does not keep careful track of what's happening in popular music these days, and seems entirely dismissive of most that he's heard. I asked him a few times if there were young and active artists out there whom he liked, and all I got was that Momus (mid-40s) is a "great lyricist," and that he likes the new High Llamas record. Since he stopped reviewing records, he doesn't get them sent to him for free in the mail anymore, so he says that "unless it's boring thumping disco music, I probably don't hear it, until my friends play it for me. Which they rarely do anymore, since I hate everything they play for me."

'...Merritt feels there is nothing new or groundbreaking in popular music these days. "There needs to be a new technology," he said. "That's usually when that happens. Robotics would be great. If we could have an easily used robot guitar, for example, we could do lots of nifty things that have not been done. Computer-assisted songwriting would also be great."

'With my Luddite hackles raised by this and a few of Merritt's other comments (he's enthusiastic about the development of computerized singing), I wound up asking a genuinely ridiculous question: "Would you want a world in which everyone played perfectly metronomical drumbeats all the time?" Merritt paused to bask in the full absurdity of the question, and then, smiling, his voice more animated than at any other time during our conversations, answered, "Yes! Yes, I would!"

Thank you, Stephin!

Story