Copperhead Road - Steve Earle

: music, January 12 2021 ▶

If you are looking for a proper theme music to go with your pickup truck, while flying the Confederate flag, chatting with your full-tactical-gear buddies how to topple the government, look no further! Steve Earle made it perfect, in 1988, recording the "Copperhead Road" (US Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks - reaching 10th position). Earle never became extremely popular, but continues to create "neo-rockabilly" songs up till today.

There is nothing subtle - the lyrics paint a young man, with moonshiner's roots, depicted often as redneck (popular theme in many country songs, nothing bad with it). He goes to war twice, probably felt himself on the right spot there, then using his family property on the Copperhead Road to grow weed. The place is know to be an outlaw territory, and authorities, who try to go there, never return. As a young kid I somehow connected the song to the Vietnam war era, not fully understanding the lyrics, also influenced by a movie or two, but, as the melody progresses in more rhythmic rock-folk, you can literally hear the Huey-s flying overhead. The guy never overcame the war. The nightmare continues. Somehow he accepts to be an outsider in his own country and grasps the last thing he got - his "family heritage" and the last stand his "daddy and his daddy before" made on the Copperhead Road.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Sinatra, 1963

: music, December 19 2020 ▶

"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", sang by Frank Sinatra in 1963, is indubitably the most appropriate song for this year's celebration. Very sad, nostalgic, reflecting on some bad times and hoping for better ones, the song may just fit as well in a doomsday scene, like the one portrayed in Terminator3's ending or a Fallout game. Nukes falling in slow motion, total destruction and carnage, radioactive silence...

The character went through some terrible stuff lately, it is not a holiday time in his heart, he wishes all best to the others, but his internal suffering goes on. He is longing for his friends, probably the only stable point in his life, but remains very pessimistic of the future, relying only on the Fate to gather them again.The "hanging star" replaces even a bleaker line, from the original song: "Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow". Sinatra asked the author, Hugh Martin, if he could revise it with something more joyful. The song was written in 1943 for the musical "Meet Me in St. Louis" and Judy Garland's character is singing it to her sister, anticipating big changes in their life. The 1963 version is used also in an execution scene in the anti-war movie "The Victors", sparkling a lot of controversy.
I chose Sinatra's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to be my Christmas song last year (I have one each year), but for 2020 I just could pick a better candidate. Covid-19 destroyed our lives and The World as we know it. Things will never be the same again. We are in a war-like situation, without having a war. The vaccines are just entering circulation, but nobody knows if they are not worse than the disease itself. People lost trust and faith in everything. The politicians hide their real agenda behind inadequate measures and "The Church" dug its head in the sand, instead of helping. I hope they burn in hell for this! And for the normal people: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas!