Drones – "Shark Fin Blues" (2005)

You are all my brothers

And you have been kind

But what were you expecting to find?

The plot of the first season of The Affair – a Showtime series that premiered in 2014 – is pretty straightforward.  

While spending the summer on Long Island with his wife and four kids, a forty-something teacher and wannabe novelist (Noah) encounters a thirty-something waitress (Alison), who is also married.  One thing leads to another . . . hence, the title of the series.

But the plot of season two – which I just finished watching – is a hot mess.  

Noah (Dominic West) and Helen (Maura Tierney)

In season two, Noah leaves his wife (Helen), writes a best-selling book, and marries Alison, who promptly gets pregnant.  

A few episodes later, Alison goes into labor while Noah is living la vida loca at a spectacular party at the Long Island home of a Hollywood producer who wants to turn Noah’s book into a movie.  

While Noah is at the party, he climbs into a hot tub to join two naked young women who are making out.  But one of them turns out to be his crazy daughter (Whitney) – who had gotten pregnant by Alison’s ne’er-do-well ex-brother-in-law (Scotty) the previous season, then had an abortion.  

Alison (Ruth Wilson) and Noah

Noah is horrified, and tries to get the hell out of Dodge.  But Hurricane Sandy has hit the Hamptons while he was busy snorting cocaine and cavorting with supermodels, and the roads back to New York City are impassable.  Alison delivers her baby solo.

Alison then admits that she slept with her ex-husband (Cole) once after she and Noah were married, and that Cole could be the father of their daughter.  

In the last episode of season two, Alison is confronted by her shady ex-brother-in-law, Scotty.  They argue, he grabs her, and as she’s struggling to break free, she accidentally shoves him right into the path of Noah’s car . . . which Helen is driving.  That’s the end of good ol’ Scotty.  

The detective looking into Scotty's death knows that Noah had beaten the crap out of Scotty and threatened to kill him when he found out that Scotty had knocked up his daughter Whitney, so Noah is a prime suspect from the very beginning of the investigation. 

Noah's arrest

And when a witness tells the detective that he saw Noah washing off his car the night of Scotty’s death, Noah is arrested.

Season two comes to an end as Noah suddenly leaps up during his trial for vehicular homicide and shouts “I DID IT!” in order to shield both his new wife (the mother of his – or perhaps Cole’s – young daughter) and his old one (the mother of his four other children) from prosecution.

(Oops . . . did I forget to say SPOILER ALERT?  Sorry about that!)

As season-ending cliffhangers go, it’s not “Who shot J.R.?” but it’s not bad.  I'm counting the days until the DVDs of season three make it to my local public library.

Here's a trailer for the The Affair that includes scenes from all three seasons that have aired to date:

*     *     *     *     *

The best song on The Affair’s soundtrack is Lucinda Williams’s “Changed the Locks,” but that song was featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines.  

So today we’re featuring “Shark Fin Blues,” which is the best song on the soundtrack of the Sundance TV series, Rectify.

“Shark Fin Blues” was released on Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, a 2005 album by the Drones, who hail from Australia.

Rectify is about a guy in his thirties who is released from prison after spending half his life on death row thanks to the delivery of some misplaced DNA evidence.  The show set in a small town in Georgia – not on Long Island – and is about as different from The Affair as it can be.

Here’s “Shark Fin Blues,” a hot mess of a song that tells a Moby Dick-like tale, except that the role of the great white whale is played by a shark “that's bigger than a submarine”:

Lucinda Williams – "Changed the Locks" (1988)

I changed the number on my phone

So you can't call me up at home

And you can't say those things to me

That make me fall down on my knees

Lucinda Williams follows the "Keep it simple, stupid" principle.

“Changed the Locks” – which was released in 1988 on her eponymous third album – is about as simple a song as was ever written, consisting of a single musical concept and a single lyrical concept.  (If you’re a mediocre musician and you need to learn a song in ten minutes, I’d recommend “Changed My Locks.”)

The song consists of six verses, each of which is metrically identical – each has an AABB rhyme pattern, and the first line of each verse is repeated after the fourth line of that verse is sung.  

The verses are musically indistinguishable from one another as well.  In fact, the lines of each verse are musically indistinguishable – each line is sung over the same simple chord pattern.

When it comes to the song’s lyrical content, each verse is a variation on a single theme.  Each begins with the singer declaring that she has changed something in her life – she’s changed the lock on her front door, changed the number on her phone, changed the kind of car she drives, changed the kind of clothes she wears, and so on – ostensibly to keep her ex-boyfriend or ex-husband at a distance.  “I am sooooo over you!” seems to be the message she is trying to communicate.

There’s not even a chorus to complicate things.  

Just because a song is simple doesn’t mean it’s not good.  “Changed My Locks” wouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is if it wasn’t simple.

Let’s take a closer look at the lyrics to “Changed My Locks.”

Here’s the second verse, which is quoted at the beginning of this post:

I changed the number on my phone

So you can't call me up at home

And you can't say those things to me

That make me fall down on my knees

Why is the singer so afraid of getting a phone call from her ex?  Because he’s going to say something nasty or threatening?  

Hardly.  She hears that he’ll call her and go right into the kind of irresistible love talk that leaves her weak in the knees. 

Here’s the third verse:

I changed the kind of car I drive

So you can't see me when I go by

And you can't chase me up the street

And you can't knock me off of my feet

She’s not afraid that the dude is going to literally knock her down.  No, no, no – her concern is that an encounter with him will knock her off of her feet emotionally.

The final verse hammers this point home:

I changed the name of this town

So you can't follow me down

And you can't touch me like before

And you can't make me want you more

The first rhyming couplet is a little confusing if you take it literally.  What the singer means when she says that she “changed the name of this town” is that she packed up and moved to a different city because she realizes that if she runs into the guy and he touches her once more, it will make her want him even more than she already does.

Get the picture?  The singer’s not trying to avoid the guy because she’s sooooo over him, but because she’s not sooooo over him.  She knows that if they cross paths that she won’t be able to resist him – she’ll fall down on her knees to him.

Might as well face it, lady, you’re addicted to the dude.  Just like an alcoholic trying to avoid temptation doesn’t hang out where other people are drinking, the singer needs to avoid proximity to her ex if she has any hope of freeing herself from the emotional hold he has on her.

*     *     *     *     *

Lucinda Williams never graduated from high school, but managed to get admitted to the University of Arkansas.  She dropped out after one semester.

Her father, Miller Williams, was an English professor at Arkansas for decades.  Williams was a prolific poet who got a lot of attention when he was asked to read one of his poems at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about his career was that he started out as a biology professor before switching to English.

Lucinda released a couple of albums when she was in her twenties, but they sank without a trace.  Her third album – which includes “Changed the Locks” – was released in 1988, when she was 35.  Neither it nor her next album (both of which were produced by someone named – I kid you not – Gurf Morlix) did much better.

Lucinda Williams and Gurf Morlix

She began to focus on songwriting and won the 1994 Grammy for best country song for “Passionate Kisses,” which had been a big hit for Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Williams finally hit it big as a recording artist with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which was released in 1998.  She was an overnight success at age 45.  

If you’re good at math, you’ve probably already figured out that Lucinda Williams is now 64 years old – emphasis on the “old.”  (She’s barely six months younger than me, which means she is very old indeed.)

You can click here to read Bill Buford’s 2000 New Yorker profile of Lucinda Williams.  (Buford is a very good writer, but that piece is a little overheated.)

*     *     *     *     *

I discovered “Changed the Locks” while watching the second season of the Showtime series, The Affair.  Here's a clip of one of the characters singing along with the song as it plays on the radio as she drinks a glass of wine (not her first of the day, I might add) and gets dressed to go out on a hot date:

I’ll have more to say about The Affair (which is a wonderful guilty-pleasure TV show) in the next 2 or 3 lines.

Here’s “Changed the Locks”:

And here's a video of Lucinda performing the song live in 1990.  (Her guitar player is the aforementioned Gurf Morlix.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: