“Funhouse Mirror” has a storied history. It was initially written way back in 1993, and I got as far as recording instrumental tracks before abandoning it. The subject of the lyrics was a rather hapless soul who could not face reality unless he was in an altered state of consciousness. For some reason I was never satisfied with the lyrics, and didn’t really have a melody and didn’t feel like the song cohered.
Fast-forward more than 20 years. I was looking through old songwriting notebooks and came upon “Funhouse Mirror” again. This time, I liked the lyrics, but not the music. So I gave the lyrics to my Chameleon Red bandmate John Franjione to see if he could come up with some music for them. He came back with a slightly macabre-sounding chord progression, but I think neither of us could come up with a suitable melody. I then played him the original music I had written for the song, and he urged me to go with that instead. Again, I set the song aside.
While going through my old song ideas in mid-2020, looking for something to mine for the Covid Isolation Series, I re-listened to the music for “Funhouse Mirror,” and looked at the words again. I suddenly realized that I could make the lyrical subject a person who sees a distorted version of the world due to exposure to political propaganda. It was easy to adapt the first few lines of the original lyrics to this new purpose, and then I was off and running. I tweaked the music a little, including adding the solo chord progression and the Zeppelin-esque riff before the last chorus. The mellow coda was actually part of the original music. I recruited Kirk Roberts of our Plague Pod to play drums, the first time I’d played with another musician in person since the pandemic started.
For the video, I got my friend Rosemary to film her husband in the role of angry white guy railing at the TV, then added some footage of myself as a circus ringmaster. I included a little clip from the “Skeleton Crew” video from way back in 2013, just for fun. This was #7 in the Covid Isolation Series, and was the seventh video released in as many months. I decided to take a break before making more.
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