Hometown Boy Made Bad
There are certainly some sonic sacrifices that accompanied the decision to record this album live to digital 2-track instead of multi-tracked. On the other side of the scale there’s the urgent spontaneity of tracks like this.
I wrote “Hometown Boy Made Bad” in Vienna when I was shooting “Averill’s Arrival”. In the months before being cast in the film I’d fallen into an academic obsession with the history of Nazism, and then I found myself in Hitler’s home country shooting scenes in and around sites famously associated with his rise and its aftermath. In my own weird way I based my portrayal of the title character in the film on my imagining a young Adolf in Vienna and, as often happens, this approach led to a song.
When we recorded it my memory is of a shared sense of tapping into our shadow energy to the point where after the recording (but before listening back) some of the group were visibly shaken and troubled by the experience. Once we heard what we’d captured we were fully seduced by the song’s spell and it became one of our most dependable live numbers.
Lyrics
HOMETOWN BOY MADE BAD
My country ’tis of thee
sure looks like Germany
1933
Prepared for genocide
Shrouded in foolish pride
From every mountainside
Let free-
dom
ring…
Well he was born
just down the street
Two hungry eyes
in a piece of meat
He loved his mother and obeyed his dad
then the hometown boy made bad
Well in school he couldn’t ever get it right
I saw a photograph once
It was a sickly sight, alright
A perpetual undergrad
and the hometown boy made bad
Well ya try hard
and ya concentrate
you can turn that love ’round into hate
It’s a gift our hero had
when the hometown boy made bad
And so he moved
slightly
to the east
when he returned he was
a king of the beasts alright
and the neighborhood was so glad
that the hometown boy made bad
It’s a little too late to debate
if it’s his fault or it’s his fate
It was all just a passing fad
when the hometown boy made bad
Credits
Written by Andras Jones
Recorded live and engineered by
Colin Mahoney & John Nason
Andras Jones – Lead Vocals & Acoustic Guitar
John Nason – Lead Guitar & Vocals
Marshall Thompson – Keyboards & Vocals
Clay Goldstein – Harmonica
Brian Mastalski – Bass Guitar
Colin Mahoney – Drums
Purchase
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