THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

Another Song on the Radio

And the hits just keep on coming.

The Muster Point Project’s latest single “I Love That Song” is not to be confused with “That Song” by Big Wreck or Joe Jackson’s lovely “A Slow Song.” As was the case with “I Got This” I wrote the lyrics for TMPP aka Kevin Franco on a sheet of graph paper, block printing in blue medium ballpoint. That’s my job done. If Kevin decides to work with my words he comes up with a title, composes the music, works out his vocals and plays all instruments (at least on the demos). To me it’s reminiscent of that church rummage sale fishing game where the kid casts a line over a barrier painted like an underwater scene, smiling doe-eyed Disney fish, and always hooks something good.

I wish “Honky Tonk Women” (“Woman” on my Hot Rocks compilation) was twenty minutes long. A modicum of its magic is its brevity, three and out: Play it again. There are a few other songs which insist on immediate repeat when I’m in charge of the stereo, any Joe Cocker take on John Sebastian’s “Darling Be Home Soon,” Neil mewing “Helpless,” Van Morrison contemplating “Saint Dominic’s Preview” and for reasons I can’t explain, John Mellencamp’s “Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)” – maybe it’s the loud Cuban band crucifying John Lennon. There are others of course, God knows there are others: Those were days of roses, poetry and prose and Martha all I had was you and all you had was me.

Determined not to give Kevin the obvious rhyme of “song” and “gone,” I imagined the chorus of “I Love That Song” as a simplistic nostalgic celebration with maybe an allusion to the Saturday Night Live sketch featuring John Belushi as the party guest who never leaves: I’m just going to flip through your albums again….Guilty!

The verses, scribbled in my Hilroy exercise book, came out very differently when printed on my pad of graph paper. Growing up is very confusing. Adults tell you things but they don’t explain them. I couldn’t figure out why the nuns and priests revered an angry and jealous god who loved everybody unconditionally, but with conditions or else. It didn’t make any sense to me. “I Love That Song” is about coming of age, about dropping others’ tired suppositions and impositions. Rock music and hormones grease the process, that green, almost premature awakening. It’s liberating to climb out of an established doctrinal rut in to one of your own making. But “coming of age” should never, ever be a phase or a phrase followed by a full stop….A rut is a rut is a rut is a rut, right in the nuts, a narrow channel by another name.

Kevin spends a lot of his time down Santiago way. I read a recent interview with him in which he said the music he composed for “I Love That Song” had an absorbed Latin influence, Chile by osmosis. I can’t tell a tango from Santana, mainly because I can’t stand Santana. What I did pick up on Kevin’s initial demo was the “Gimmie (Let It Bleed sleeve; see “Women” vs. “Woman”) Shelter” clicking, whirring noise. I believe this sound is made by a percussive instrument known as a guiro. In both songs it imparts dread, suggesting the internal workings of a clock, toothy sprockets rotating, and time inexorably ticking down toward a grim finality.

The Muster Point Project’s official lyric video of “I Love That Song” is easily found on YouTube. You can also stream “I Love That Song” on all the usual channels; it’s everywhere and on the radio too.             

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of shameless self-promotion since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it from assorted retailers in your preferred format.