[audio:shotgun.mp3]
I’m a big believer in the power of mystery and well-intentioned obfuscation when it comes to music. I love songs where the lyrics are clearly about something – there’s an internal logic that relates the verses to each other, and the choruses – even if you don’t know exactly what the song is about.
But.
Some people really, really want to know what a song is about, and, specially for them (and because otherwise I’d have nothing to write about here), I’ll tell you that Shotgun is about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.
This is definitely not something I ever intended to write a song about, but I was walking past a bookstore one morning, I saw Courtney Love dressed in some super high-fashion outfit on a magazine cover, and an entire verse and chorus assembled themselves before my very ears.
The interesting thing is that it actually…wasn’t this song. It was a song about clothes, a terrible song, and I banged my head against it for a week before suddenly, while sitting at my keyboard of pain, started playing this song instead. . I think I wrote the whole thing in about an hour ( an hour and a week…). Weird.