Dustin Welch, Super Rooster Music (SESAC); Jeremiah Nelson, CanopyAgency (BMI); Jedd Hughes, Cemetery Hill (BMI/Tiltawhirl)
Intro Theme: Libertango by Astor Piazzola
SDRM S.I.A.E Direzoine Generale/Spirit Two Music/OBO Curci USA Music Publishing
Untold misfortune spent and lost
Never cover the cost
Of this constant consequence and sin
So buy another dirty magazine
Did we have to kill the queen
This concerto needs a cheap violin
Chorus
I’d ask you in to have a drink, but this ain’t no tea for two
And I’m too blue to tango with you
So I sleep with the lights left on
My microscope sights drawn
Observing every disturbing detail
I ain’t been thinking so clear
The static in the atmosphere
Is like a razor thin invisible veil
Repeat Chorus
So fill your glasses to the brim
Pose for the hungry lens
And exercise no shred of self control
I’ll steal the jack o’ lantern’s smile
Talk like I am on trial
And keep on scribbling in cryptic code
Repeat Chorus
Dustin Welch: lead vocals, acoustic guitar, gut-string guitar on Libertango; Jeremy Nail: electric guitar, background vocals; Scotty Bucklin: keyboard; Trisha Keefer: violin; Steve Bernal: bass, background vocals; Eldridge Goins: drums, percussion, background vocals; Bukka Allen: accordion on Libertango
I developed a strange obsession in high school with tango music, especially that of the great and venerable Astor Piazzola. My dear friend Cory Younts’ mother, who performed with the Nashville Ballet Company, was dating an Argentinian man and they began teaching me about the history of the tango; how it had emerged from the brothels and underbelly of Buenos Aries to become the national pastime. Piazzola himself was basically excommunicated for creating Nuevo Tango, only to return many years later hailed as a genius. I began this song when I was eighteen, and always knew that when I finally recorded it, I would play Piazzola’s Libertango as the introduction theme.
I unearthed the chord progression around the same time that ‘Party Girl’ came about. I was venomously sick with popular culture and paparazzi and our compulsion to glorify and celebrate the deliberately dysfunctional. Alas! It was no time to be a poet. My Australian friend, Jedd Hughes, was in Austin and came over one day. We knocked out a fair piece of the arrangement and most of a verse, and then I finished the last verse with Jeremiah up in a remote cabin somewhere in Northern Wisconsin one night over several bottles of wine and a giant fish we destroyed trying to cook. Poets we remained, nonetheless.