Tom: A David Hasselhoff cameo in the video may sound promising—
Tim: Nope.
Tom: Yep, fair point. But don’t worry, because the mariachi band is so much better.
Tim: That was BRILLIANT.
Tom: Wasn’t it just? I mean, how do you make a mariachi band and Spanish guitar sound good in a pop song? And how can it be so damn catchy? Well, I’ve got an explanation: it’s been assembled from parts of many, many other songs.
Tim: Well…
Tom: The verse is a Latin version of “Phantom of the Opera”. The pre-chorus line is from the same musical – the patter bit of “Masquerade” (“The toast of all city, what a pity…”) The chorus is a bit of the Vandals’ “My Girlfriend’s Dead” crossed with another song that I can’t quite place now. The horn section is straight out of “I Will Survive”. They’ve all been changed, of course – there’s still some composing in there – but it does sound bolted-together.
Tim: Right, I’m in two minds, here. I agree with you about the Phantom link, which is almost as blatant as Alphabeat was with The Who, and quite how it could be there without being deliberate is beyond me. The “I Will Survive” link is pretty much there, and the song you can’t place is Girl All The Bad Guys Want.
Tom: Ha! I even saw Bowling for Soup once live – they’re a band that clearly enjoys themselves on stage – and I still didn’t place that.
Tim: However, I want to disagree about the Vandals link. Yes, it is exactly the same idea, but the logic makes me think of everything that annoys me about that Everything Is A Remix thing, where he reckons that just about every scene in every film has been stolen.
The thing is, for any given scene, there are only a limited number of ways to frame it; with seventy years of film-making previously, of course someone’s going to have done it before. That doesn’t make it copying, it makes it an inevitable coincidence, and it’s quite possibly the same here.
Sure, maybe they did think “That’s a cool theme for a song – we should do that and hope no-one notices,” and I won’t deny it’s a possibility, but maybe it’s just two songs out of almost a century of pop music that share a somewhat unusual theme. To be honest, I’d be astounded if there were only two.
Tom: Fair point – and it would have been my default theory if it wasn’t for all the other, er, homages throughout the track.
I still like it, though. I like it a lot.
Tim: Good, because I reckon it’s great. What’s particularly good is that he’s done that thing comedy songwriters have to do (which The Vandals didn’t do), which is rewrite the chorus each time so it’s still fun.
Tom: Which, considering it’s the same Train that did the definitely-not-comedy “Drops of Jupiter” ten years ago, is quite a good thing.
Tim: Yeah, and sure, he could have just stuck with the quicksand, the shark and the sunbed, which would have been perfectly acceptable, but instead he put a bit more in and added a lion, a mudslide and a hot tub. Would have been even better if he’d done it at the end as well, but it’s still a handsome list. It’s a good tune (original or otherwise), it’s got a whole lot of energy to it and it’s exactly what I want to hear (although I’d prefer it if the lyrics reflected the video with the car one – ‘got decapitated by a purple Scion’ would be so much better).
Tom: Incidentally, who fills a cement mixer full of quicksand?