The Singing of a Minor Deity In a Major Key
Wonderful news for music lovers! Next week I will release the first of the seven new songs that make up my new Sinking Out Loud collection. One of them, “The Water in the Fountain”, is in 7/8, all of them feature my exquisite singing. A pretty gal I used to know, dressed head to toe in calico, once described mine as “the singing of a minor deity, albeit in a major key”. (I prefer not to think she was referencing my whimsical sense of pitch.)
Indeed, some of my fans in recent years have played my songs for hospitalized loved (or avidly liked) ones, and in every case the loved one’s health has improved. There was a geezer (in the British sense) down in Crawley (memorialized in the Who song “Boris the Spider”) who hadn’t walked in 27 years when his niece Patrice, not obese, and wonders never cease, played him “Talisman Square” from the Internettes’ 2020 debut (and farewell) album. He now plays “footie” (the British have rarely met a word they didn’t want to infantilize) every other Saturday with his mates (in the British sense).
“Talisman Square”. ©2020 by John Mendelsohn. All rights reserved. Sung by Dame Zelda Hyde.
(A pretty prescient song, “Talisman Square”. At the time I was writing it, in Almuñecar, Granada, España, in 2019, I of course had no idea that it would perfectly sum up the late winter of 24/25, during which the changes have indeed been coming too fast for America.)
Another person who regained her health as a result of exposure to my music, Florence (Floozi) Flanagan, is now the bass player in my band, which goes by a variety of different names, depending on the gig. At country gigs, we are Johnny Ned Mendelssohn & His Clean Hankies. At goth and occult gigs, The Human Rites. At punk gigs, The Fast-Acting Laxatives or The Urine Samples. At metal gigs, Millions Flee. At ordinary pub gigs, the attendees of which commonly want to request many of Oasis’s greatest hits, the Wonderwallets. And at LGBTQ affairs, Cornwhole. Imagine my delight on discovering Flooz to be the first cousin, once removed, but then replaced, of Fatso Flanagan, the morbidly obese slugger of the Richmond River Rats, our local baseball team.
Following her my-music-enabled recovery from Foyle’s Disease, named after the famous Shaftesbury Avenue bookseller that once gave a dangerously intoxicated John Lennon an award for his novel The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or maybe I’m thinking of John Le Carré, Floozi weighs only 116 pounds, but 82 of them are pure funk, as witness my 2008 tribute to George W. Bush.
“We’re Not Done With You Yet”. ©2008 by John Mendelsohn. All rights reserved. Sung by the composer.
Other members of Johnny Ned Mendelssohn & His Clean Hankies, The Human Rites, The Fast-Acting Laxatives, Millions Flee, Cornwhole, and The Wonderwallets include guitarist Dazza du Toit, an admitted South African, but no great fan of Elon Musk, and drummer Mick (Metatarsals) Moribund-Sludge, whose snooty accent Floozi enjoys mocking, and the rest of the band isn’t supposed to know that the two of them have a thang going on.
