\u201cFunhouse Mirror\u201d 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\u2019t really have a melody and didn\u2019t feel like the song cohered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fast-forward more than 20 years. I was looking through old songwriting notebooks and came upon \u201cFunhouse Mirror\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cFunhouse Mirror,\u201d 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\u2019d played with another musician in person since the pandemic started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cSkeleton Crew\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cFunhouse Mirror\u201d has a storied history. It was initially written way back in 1993, and I got as far as recording instrumental tracks before abandoning…<\/p>\n