"Aaron Quain" takes the stage (click to enlarge)

This is not a Kevin Quain song, but it's meant to sound like one.

I like Kevin's music, and I like Kevin. He also runs an open-stage, the "Mad Bastard Cabaret", that I love. I performed with him the first night I ever performed. I've been trying to broaden myself by writing songs in different styles. So I wrote a pseudo-Quain song. I even dressed up like him the week before Halloween when I debuted it.

Kevin Quain's not shy of minor chords, so I used them too. Very similar to Leonard Cohen's "First, We Take Manhattan (RealAudio | Wav) The picking style was patterned after Kevin's "Coffee Dogs", but he fingerpicks, while I just use a pick.

Kevin Quain often writes about slightly off topics. He writes about thieves ("Thief of Dances"), gangsters, vampires ("Tequila Vampire Matinée"), and death ("Mr. Vallentine's Dead", "If You Don't Come Back to Me", "Henrietta's Belfry"). I was trying to write a Quain song, so I wanted to combine a few of these.

How could I combine death, gangsters, and, in my original formulation, vampires? Well, I thought up the phrase "The grave you dig may be your own", the counterpoint to "The life you save may be your own". And I hit on the notion of the Protection racket. Gangsters were involved, but they were also vampires, in the sense that they were leaches. And if the business being Protected were a cemetary, the talk of graves would be a little less metaphorical.

The whole "grave you dig" metaphor becomes literal, as does the phrase "one foot in the grave".

I'm also happy to have a polysyllabic rhyme-word in "desecrated".

Questions, comments or suggestions about this web site? Email me at aaron.bentley@utoronto.ca