But I had broken my 4th personal DVD player this year (a $60 Sony DNS313F “unbreakable”) listening each night to audio books on my back porch, falling asleep, and crashing down the four cement steps that separate the porch from the patio. So I only had a couple old cassette players and plenty of cassette audio books and I listened to them whilst my 700 CDs slept on the shelf in my office/bedroom and Butch Walker remained in his sleeve.

So I bought a $15 Jensen CD player (probably not the original Jensen sound people; most likely Fred Jensen, a citizen of Taiwan and the World) and tried it out. It’s shit of course, and there’s no “carry time”. When you fart or burp, the music skips like the old days when the drunkest guy at the party fell across the turntable. But when I can stay perfectly still and not consume any gas-producing meals, I hear a sound.

And with Butch Walker, I hear a voice. He sings IN FRONT of the fuckin music like Bob Dylan used to do when he changed the world. I know it’s out of fashion, but it’s nice to hear the lyric, since somebody, in this case, Butch, went to some trouble to write it.

And it’s very, very nice, as is the music. Catchy buy still sufficiently complex, and hooky without being trivial. Now Jensen and I have been through the material a couple of times, and I want more, so I’ll tiptoe to the porch and hope for no earthquakes.

Thanks, Jeff. Butch really rocks.

johnthebasket

I used to love to eat duck… I thought it was pretty darn tasty. Until I worked on a 1920′s era replica farm…

We had a duck and I just loved her. I even trained her to do little tricks…

I don’t eat duck anymore.