Killing Civilians

“Warrior Christ” is here.

And that’s going to be it for a while for the Jimmy Kaufmann solo EP. The next two songs are quite a ways off from being anywhere near ready to record, and since I’ll be working on the Kaufmann on Kaufmann EP, Musicians of Sound, recording the rest of Tough Nuggets, and actual work I get paid for, I can’t even give you a ballpark estimate of when it will be finished. The damn Homo Camp double album might come out before this EP is finished… hell, so might the Squidbeak album.

Anyway, I said I’d have something to say about the lyrics, and since I hate lying to small groups of people over the Internet, here’s the megalomania:

Look At Me With Someone You Love.
For this EP, I wanted to go back to some of the standard Jimmy Kaufmann themes and try to present them without comic irony. Part of that strategy meant I couldn’t undercut the primary theme of the song by including a contradictory line or two, which is something I’m too fond of. I think I did pretty well on “Just Like Falling In Love” (disease/loss/the cruelty of time passing) and “We’ve Been Married” (divorce/disgust). Pretty straightforward, and as irony free (in the lyrics) as I can get. Things got a bit more complicated with “Warrior Christ,” simply because god/religion/extremist violence/sin contains inherent contradictions. So there are two voices of Christ present in the song, with the title indicating which one is dominant and which one is the ironic counterpoint. Oh, well.

There are two more songs on this EP, and I imagine one will be about totalitarianism, and the other about betrayal. We’ll see how they turn out. The totalitarianism song might be rough. And that just about covers The Lyrical Obsessions of Jimmy Kaufmann. ¹

Musicians of Sound.
So the premise here is that we’re writing a 70s album. ² Not all the songs are going to be seven-minute epics (although there’ll be a few!), but I decided to write the lyrics as if they were.

Originally I had the idea of making this the bleakest album in the world. Then I figured that 14 songs is a shit-ton of bleakness, and since it would be nice if people actually enjoyed listening to DYM, I’d try to make the bleakest EP in the world (because nobody’s feelings get hurt if people can’t bear to listen to Jimmy Kaufmann).

So here’s Plan B: each song is going to present a scenario that occurs in a world slightly different from this one. Uncharitably, you could claim (as Monkey did) that this will lead to a steaming pile of Led Zeppeliny/ren fairey horseshit, but I’m hoping more for a steaming pile of Calvino-y/Borges-y horseshit. It might end up simply resembling your standard everyday pop song surrealism, which will be mildly disappointing, but we’ll see.

And I might as well say something about I Am The Culture, the Kaufmann On Kaufmann EP I’m writing with Eloise. It’ll be about happiness and kittens and vacations and love and (the positive aspects of) summertime. Among other things.

1. Yeah, nothing about the weather. Sorry, folks. And I’m not even going to try to write a non-ironic dirty sex song. [↩]
2. At some point I hope Towel Boy has the time to slap together a rough mock-up of the cover art that we can show people, because the concept of this album works a lot better when you stare for half an hour at the photo we’ll be using. [↩]