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Kinky
Released September 2000
The Making Of:
Q-Can you give us some insight into the lyrics?
John:
LITTLE MISS PERFECT
This song was the first original song that I ever played for Levi. We were sitting on the couch of my apartment in Bozeman at the time, and he listened with wide eyes. "Dude, we could TOTALLY do originals!" That was back in the summer of 1999. The rest, my friends, is Clintons history!
GOT TO GO
Ian Anderson, former Clintons guitar player extraordinaire, wrote this song about a girl whom he knew he needed to break up with. The lyrics "Say goodbye, I've got to go, it's ok you won't be alone," and "Just be happy with what's right in front of you, don't lock yourself up like you do," was his plea for her to not fool herself into thinking she'd never be happy again.
I CAN’T SEE YOU
I wrote this song when I was in love with the idea of a girl I didn't know. I made up fantastic things in my mind about her and found myself addicted to my own imagination. "I want you! Who are you?" and "I can't have you with my eyes open," are all lyrics that sum up the desire which permeate through every lyric of this song.
BLUE GIRL
My good friend Charity Frank would work 60 hour weeks as a bartender for months at a time, then go and take two weeks off to travel around and watch the band Widespread Panic play shows. Her nickname was "Blue Girl," the same title of a WP song. I remember watching her take a break one day. As she leaned over on the bar and put her head in her hands, I could see she was smiling with her eyes closed. A recent memory of dancing, listening to WP play, singing along, etc, was radiating through her. At that moment, she was at peace. It lasted ten, maybe twenty seconds, and then she was back to cleaning, stocking the bar, etc. It was short, but it inspired me to write a song about her and that moment. "You'll find your peace, chasing your Panic around."
KINKY
My friend Randy Craig wrote the guitar riff to this song. He played it for me and told me the riff “wreaked of pop music.” He wasn’t going to do anything with it, so I told him I was going to write a song around it. He laughed and said, “if you sell it to the Backstreet Boys, don’t tell anyone I had anything to do with the guitar.” Well the BSBoys haven’t come calling so as of now we’re in the clear.
I wrote the melody and lyrics about having a crush on an airline attendant. "I wonder what you're doing now. I think about you all the time and I wonder are you thinking about me, while you're up there in the clouds, my feet are feeling bolted to the ground." Airline attendants, like band guys, need love too.
CAT IN THE HAT
The song was of course inspired by the Dr. Seuss book by the same title. It has some references to other books "The Star Bellied Sneaches" as well as "Green Eggs and Ham." The whole idea was to create a fun, jazzy song about "The Cat" sort of being some kind of snide boss, but I wanted to keep it light hearted. The lyrics "Frankie (Sinatra) had Nancy (Sinatra), Harry's (Connick Jr.) got Jill (Connick), they've got everything under the sun," were my attempt at throwing some love to two of my favorite male jazz vocalists. Then again, Nancy was Frank's daughter and Jill is Harry's wife, so that didn't quite have the "umph" I had initially hoped for. Oh well.
THAT GIRL
This was my first attempt at a reggae song that I wrote for a girl I was dating at the time. We met in a coffee shop through mutual friends, and it turned into a fun relationship. I always thought that the question/answer parts of the song would turn into a crowd favorite, but they never did. I envisioned me saying on the mic, "do you think that girl is going to give me her phone number?”, and the crowd would answer, "hell no!" Alas, it never happened, and was basically dropped from the live show a year or two after the record came out.
LONG TIME LEAVING
Again, Ian Anderson, former Clintons guitar guru, wrote this song about a break up. He talked a lot more about coping with the time it would take to gather the courage to break up with someone, but he never got into specifics in the lyrics. "It's gonna take a long time of wondering, I always knew it would, it's gonna take a long time of leaving you, I never really thought I could." The decision's been made, but it's causing some pain to act on it.
On a separate note, don't be afraid to listen to the amazing drum fill before the 2nd chorus at time marker 2:02. Levi hits his toms in fine 80's fashion and it kills me EVERY FRIGGIN' TIME!
EXCUSE TO JAM
This was the first song I ever wrote! I was living in Lewis and Clark dormitory at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming. I wrote this sucker about a break up, but the riff was just a lot of fun to play and I didn't really (at that point in my life) have any pain of a break up in my personal life to draw lyrics from, so it didn't turn out to be a bitter song. I couldn't title it, "I Hate You" or "We Broke Up" because, like I said, the song was basically just an excuse to jam.
Keehr told me it sounded like a Doobie Brothers song when I first played it for him. I’ll admit that I had no clue who the Doobie Brothers were. When I originally wrote this song I had only been playing guitar for a year, so I thought the riff was really cool and original. Upon listening to the Doobies, I discovered that they use similar hammer on riffs in damn near every song they ever recorded. It reminds me of a lyric by Bare Naked Ladies, “It’s all been done before…”
JANA
The first girl to really steal my heart was Jana (pronounced Yanna) from Berlin, Germany. I dated a few girls before her and I'd even known I'd loved a few of my girlfriends, but I never had my feet totally swept out from underneath me until Jana. Be patient with me, cuz I was only 21 at the time. I was so hung up on her! Thus the lyrics, "if I lost myself in you, would you lose yourself in me? And if I gave my heart to you, would you love me Jana?" reflect how much I wanted to fall in love with her. Mind you I wrote the song after we'd broken up, and I knew we wouldn't date again, so I decided to throw a twist in the story.
The lyrics, "but a ring on my finger, never meant to be, held me back from holding you," was supposed to be a reference to being engaged, married, etc, but being in love with someone else! Having never been in that position (married, divorced, engaged/broke up) I took some liberties with the idea of being single again. "A fresh new felt beginning, I can taste my lust once again. The one that held my hand didn't hold my craving." It made me feel like I was actually creating a story rather than just regurgitating some lame “what should’ve been” story in this song.
Whether Jana ever heard this song or not is beyond me. I'm sure if she heard it now she'd say, "you were married!?" No, I assure you I wasn’t. Of course what I’d hope she’d say is, "I'm single, I’m still a hot German, I own a brewery now, and I'm gonna buy you a few beers if you know what I mean!" Again, it's all in my imagination.
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