Instant Nostalgia

A week or so before Trump's inauguration, Julia and I were talking about our sense of impending doom. I said Obama must be thinking, "You are gonna miss my gov'in'," singing it playfully, to the tune of the ever-popular Lou Rawls song. Julia laughed and said, "You know, if you took about five minutes and wrote that whole song up it could go viral."

I never believed that it would go viral, but the idea of doing the project captivated me. Well, I ended up working on it a little longer than five minutes. It would have been nice to have it out just before Trump's inauguration, or even during that first weekend of his nascent presidency, but while the writing of the song was done in a day, the technical aspects of getting it recorded had me bogged down. The major difficulty was that I'm not Lou Rawls, and the song wasn't in a key that's good for me. Although Julia got me an app that would change the music file I was using to a key that was more comfortable for my voice, I didn't like losing the richness that I thought the slightly lower register gave to the song, so I struggled to make the best of it, and used a couple of clunky work-arounds to get it to what I think is a listenable state. During this time there were two weekends we were out of town, during which I couldn't work on the recording or video.

As the early days of the new administration unfolded, I began to feel at once more determined to make the video and also more irrelevant. Shouldn't I be protesting instead? Making phone calls? Sending emails, signing petitions? I have done and did do some of this, but it isn't my way or forte. I'm a writer and sometime performer, so I persisted, even as what I was doing seemed to be mawkish nostalgia. Is it possible, I wondered, to be nostalgic for something that one is bereft of for only a matter of weeks? In fact I'd been missing Obama's administration even before the new one came in. I puzzled over this until I remembered Paul Krassner, famous for founding the satiric magazine, The Realist, had a one-person show that I saw at the Village Gate, entitled "Nostalgia for the Future." So I was well within bounds!

Finally the video is finished and I feel satisfied with the result, justified in making it, and gratified by the response. Please watch.

YOU'RE GONNA MISS MY GOV'MENT-a musical ode to Obama