[ foolish love | danny boy | april fools | in my arms | millbrook | baby | beauty mark | barcelona | matinee idol | damned ladies | sally ann | imaginary love ]
[ foolish love | danny boy | april fools | in my arms | millbrook | baby | beauty mark | barcelona | matinee idol | damned ladies | sally ann | imaginary love ]
A la his "Golden Girls" reference, this song has another 'inside-joke' type lyric. According to Julie ('annajuly') from the message board:
Rufus also says: It was very surreal to me at the time... I probably miss more the times when I was hanging out with all my friends on welfare, and we were, you know, doing PCP and listening to Sonic Youth, and making out and stuff.
YOU decide. *winks*
"foolish love"
Rufus says: It’s about the type of person you fall in love with who, when you take one look at him, you know it will end tragically. You know you can never really have him, but it’s what you’ve always wanted—impossible love. It’s rather up-tempo and happy-sounding but still sad. I remember writing it almost like a mantra, saying to myself, “Lighten up and trudge on.” That’s all you can do. Get out with class, the way Cole Porter would. "danny boy"
Rufus says: This one is based a little bit on Wagnerian opera. The guy from “Foolish Love,” Danny, is like the warrior-hero-babe Siegfried. When I met him it was like meeting a god, the light from him almost burning me. I never thought of the standard “Danny Boy” when I was writing it, and I think I lost a lot of gigs at places like [New York’s hip Irish venue] Sin-ƒ, because they thought I was gonna put on an Irish-American jamboree! "april fools"
Rufus says: I wrote that at a Valentine’s Day party. I was so lovesick. They had these kissing booths, and there was this cute guy in the booth everyone was kissing, but I was too shy to do it. Then I went up to relieve him of his kissing-booth duty, and nobody came to kiss me. It was terrible. You think everything’s great, and it just comes crashing down. I’d come up with the line "You will believe in love" earlier that evening in the bathtub. I stood up and sang it. It just sort of hit me as the perfect pop ball-grabber of a line. Then I went to that party. The so-called Jojo is in fact what we call in French a "medium", which is a fortune teller. She used to be well-known in Québec for her advertising programs(fortune-telling by telephone!), legal procedings against her, and flamboyant looks. She looks like a total fool, and I wonder why she's still called Jojo Medium, since she has gained so much wheight...Anyway, as I said, this may be irrelevant, but I found it kind of funny that Rufus would make a reference to her. But then I wasn't so surprised when I heard the Bea Arthur thing...
"in my arms"
Rufus says: A story about a junkie I met. We had a one-night affair—it was truly romantic. He was very young, like 17 or 18, and very beautiful and wanted to quit drugs. He’d been clean for a week, but after meeting me, he said, "I wanna do drugs and come over to your house." I said no, but he showed up anyway, totally high. And then we had this incredible night. The next day he tried to commit suicide. It didn’t work. But two years later he hanged himself with a belt. "millbrook"
Rufus says: That’s a little ditty about boarding school, just me on piano, with orchestration by Van Dyke Parks. I was looking back at the pageantry of it all—the Sunday morning parade to services, the endless lacrosse matches, the little rich kids hanging out on the green listening to Bob Marley. The whole city-on-a-hill thing. "baby"
Rufus says: Once again, orchestration by Van Dyke and me on piano. It’s about the guy in “In My Arms.” When you have feelings for someone who’s a drug addict, it’s like they’re a baby. A part of you wants to take care it, like a mother would. The song has an odd structure. There’s a long piano break in the middle, for which Van Dyke wrote an incredible string part. He transformed it from this sad little song into a gorgeous, sweeping Tennessee Williams screenplay. "beauty mark"
Rufus says: That’s about my mother. We spar a lot. She’ll write a song, I’ll write a song; she’ll put me down, I’ll put her down. I’d written a bunch of stuff she thought was terrible (and she was right). But “Beauty Mark” won her over—it was my comeback. I had to rise to her challenge. I said to myself, “Okay, I’m gonna write a perfect little classy thing. I’ll show mama!” It’s the happiest song on the album. "barcelona"
Rufus says: This song is loosely about AIDS. It’s about feeling like you just wanna go someplace and dance in the street and forget your troubles. I went to Barcelona to do just that—and had a horrible time. My friend got strep throat, the hotel was a rip-off, our car was towed and we were robbed by gypsies. The line “Fuggi, regal fantasima” is Italian. It’s from Verdi’s “Macbetto.” It means “Flee, regal phantasm.” It’s when Macbeth is going mad and sees the ghost. In my mind, the ghost was AIDS. "matinee idol"
Rufus says: I wrote this right after River Phoenix died. It sensationalizes the death of a star. It’s very up-tempo and has a lot of vibraphones and clanging and clamor—the score swells as the matinee idol lies dying on Sunset Blvd. “And the angels came down from on high.” The angels of Los Angeles. "damned ladies"
Rufus says: A song about my obsessive relationship with opera heroines—Madame Butterfly, Tosca, Mimi. It has a Viennese-type arrangement, sort of like something you’d hear in “The Third Man.” In the song, I lament how these women are constantly dying brutal deaths, which I can see coming but cannot stop. It gets me every time. "sally ann"
Rufus says: That’s the Canadian nickname for the Salvation Army. It’s another Danny song. He used to live near the Salvation Army in this very depressed area of Montreal called St. Henry. One day, I was walking around down there and imagined living on love in the bad, beautiful part of town, drinking in the bar, having to shop the Sally Ann to decorate our disgusting tenement flat. Ah! the romance of poverty. There’s even a Salvation Army-esque horn part. "imaginary love"
Rufus says: It’s about how whenever I fall in love, I have these expectations of the experience being a perfect dream, which, of course, ruins it. I imagine cradling my lover’s head in my lap in a cab in the middle of the night, and drinking champagne in an elegant hotel suite. But life’s rarely like that, and I usually end up walking home by myself in the rain. 