2021-08-07 Variety Playhouse (Atlanta)
Erin McKeown joined the band for this show.
Setlist
Recording
Banter
- This song takes place in Siberia. (The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower)
- My God, it's good to be here. [drumming and cheering] I hope to say this a bunch more times during the weeks to come, but you look beautiful in your masks. [drumming, piano, cheering, exultations] You have to stay safe and you have to stay healthy because I love you. You should do it because you love yourself, but if you can't do that, I didn't, you can lean on me. So take good care of each other. I appreciate it very much. [audience loves JD too, mostly unintelligibly, piano noodling] Uh oh. Uh oh. Fellas, if you wanna go take a break, I feel a long intro coming on. [laughter] This is the first time I've actually finished a country song I tried to write. The other one would've been a massive hit, and this whole scene would be a whole different scene. If I had followed through on the song I was gonna write, like, before NASCAR shit the bed, when NASCAR was really, really big, and everybody was like, yeah! NASCAR! It's right up there with MLB and NFL and it's like every sport, and then I don't really know exactly how it happened but I know that if you go outside in front of the stadiums, you can get tickets now. And, but, I had an idea, at the time, for a song that would be popular with NASCAR fans. It's called 'Turn Left'. And in the song 'Turn Left', I still remember the bit [singing]. Same rhyme I used in Kola Borehole Tower like, 15 years later. So I had this idea, and then my friend Perry had a really great idea, it has to be the growth of the song - I told you this was going to be long - like, first the hero to whom I'm singing is a child, watching Dale Earnhardt Sr. on TV at [unintelligible] and his father tells him, you gotta learn how to turn left. Then he's a successful NASCAR driver and he's in his prime, turn left, very triumphant. But in the third verse - it's a country song so in the third verse, he has to die. He dies. And that's what my friend Perry said - oh, that's great, so in the third verse, you've only got one......turn left. [guitar/drum stinger, laughter]. We'd all be living in the palace if I'd written that. But I was like, that, or a song about a guy who looks like a lizard. The bigger challenge. Anyways, fifteen, twenty years later, I wrote another country song. (Picture of My Dress)
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