Southpaw Jones

Southpaw Jones presents
Is This Interesting?
Thoughts/feelings that just might not matter:
Wow, two dudes out there enjoyed Shank (see Tuesday’s iPawed). I’ll have to call his agent…see if I can renegotiate his contract.

Tonight is the Hump Day show at Café Mundi. 8 pm. Matt the Electrician has abandoned me to go on “vacation” with his “family,” but I’ll play as many Southpaw hits as you can handle. Also, I’ll be joined by Harold Ambler, who just moved to Austin from Maine. And I’m trying to convince Spike to read some Spaiku.

Last week, at the Cactus Café, I ran into David Ansel, Austin’s Soup Peddler. He makes soup for delivery, and he wrote a book! He’s been a local hero of mine for some time, but we had not spoken at length. I mentioned to him that I’d love to write a theme song for each of his soups. He told he that he has “over a hundred” varieties. D’oh. I was hoping for more of a Baskin-Robbins number.

He later brought up his weekly menu e-mail with its changing themes and textures. This week’s selections, he told me, were inspired by Napoleon. Perhaps I could contribute a song? And so it was that I began my research and dusted off my songwriting brain.

Southpaw Jones presents
And Another Thing…
More verbosity with velocity and viscosity:

I became obsessed with the idea that Napoleon had so much and lost it all. Twice! Check out the story of his brief return to power, from good ol’ Wikipedia:

In France, the royalists had taken over and restored King Louis XVIII to power. Separated from his wife and son (who had come under Austrian control), cut off from the allowance guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, and aware of rumours that he was about to be banished to a remote island in the Atlantic, Napoleon escaped from Elba on February 26, 1815 and returned to the mainland on March 1, 1815. King Louis XVIII sent the Fifth Regiment, led by Marshal Michel Ney who had formerly served under Napoleon in Russia, to meet him at Grenoble on March 7, 1815. Napoleon approached the regiment alone, dismounted his horse and, when he was within earshot of Ney’s forces, shouted “Soldiers of the Fifth, you recognize me. If any man would shoot his emperor, he may do so now”. Following a brief silence, the soldiers shouted “Vive L’Empereur!” and marched with Napoleon to Paris. He arrived on March 20, quickly raising a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000 and governed for a Hundred Days.

Sounds like a pretty intense guy. So I started experimenting with Garageband and came up with a rather sad take on the man’s last days, exiled on the island of Saint Helena.

Spike Gillespie presents
A Haiku History of the World
A look at our past, / seventeen syllables and / three lines at a time:

Gutenberg printing
thrills all the writer types with
a moveable feat.

Southpaw Jones presents
iPawed [Original]
Pound for pound, the best sounds around. For free!
I almost forgot the song! Here it is. Do share with whomever you like. It is available on MySpace as well, if you’re not in the downloading mood.

Lower this Table (3:30)

Southpaw Jones presents
Paw Prints
Pics of Southpaw & his environ:
The portrait I found to go with the song:

Thank you, come again!
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