Dear Miley: you're welcome / we're sorry

Hello again friends. So by now our most obsessive fans have already learned of the great crime against good taste that we recently committed: the "cover" of Miley Cyrus' "Party In The USA". Here's how it came to be.

So the good folks at cokemachineglow reviewed The Carl Wilson Lake Mystery a few months back, setting into motion the events that would force us to go into hiding and hire reasonably convincing doubles to distract screaming teenaged girls while we went about our lives. Then those same good folks came to us with a proposition: the inclusion of one of our songs in a podcast they were putting out in the new year. The only catch: the song would have to be a cover, and a cover of something from 2009 (a rule which later changed, hanging us out to dry hugely). We happily and hastily accepted but then hit upon the horrifying realization that not one of us could think of a single song, worthy or not, from the past year, with the exception of a Wild Beasts tune that was far too good and complicated for the week and a half we had to complete the task. Panic began to set in.

But then Andy dug deep into his bag of tricks and called upon friends and family who know things about pop music. We reconvened and spent a half hour watching youtube videos of hit songs that not one of us had ever heard before. As soon as Party In The USA came on we knew we'd found our muse. First: musically it is about the simplest, easiest song in the world, which appealed to our laziness. Second: it is quite possibly the stupidest song ever written. Shaking my hips, like, yeah! Ridiculous. We'd hit the jackpot.

Within seconds Brian had sort of figured out the guitar riff (good enough!) and I'd sort of figured out the bass (good enough!) and we started laying it down. Yes. No problems at all. But then came the horrible part... the singing. Now singing those terrible words is bad enough, but I was forced to subject myself to a much more acute torture. For, never having heard the song before, I had to actually listen to it, to figure out how it went. So there I was, alone in a dark room, for hours, watching that cursed video over and over and over again, feeling like a major league degenerate / pedophile. Miley is on the hood of a car. Miley is not wearing much. The camera lingers on Miley's backside. The camera lingers on Miley's chest. Young girls everywhere feel "empowered" or some crap. I was thoroughly assaulted by what everyone already knows: Miley is very young. Miley likes to jiggle around. Great. The whole experience made me feel old and sad.

However, there is an excellent tonic for this: the world of Daniel Johnston. I had to fight the effects of Miley, so I wound up listening to a certain Johnston tune. It infected my mind. Then, when I went back to the studio to finish the singing, I hit upon a glorious realization: that this particular Daniel Johnston tune and Miley's monstrosity fit together like eggs and bacon. And there you have it. Pay attention and you'll hear it for sure.

So you want to hear it? Go here. Or here. Or here.