Farewells and Fires

It looks like a pretty solid band, Pretty Girls Make Graves, have broken up. Too bad, they were actually very good and had a ton of energy to their music. I haven't gotten into their 2006 release Élan Vital quite yet, but their 2003 album The New Romance was awesome. It featured my favorite track by them, “All Medicated Geniuses” (right click to download) which will forever remind me of my buddy Phoof.

You see when we were little growing up in Fair Lawn, NJ there was a small corn farm in town. I'm not sure what it was still doing there. It was (like most things in New Jersey) located just next to the highway right by the center area of town. Now, Fair Lawn was, and is, a very congested vibrant suburb. You had to go quite a distance to find a real working farm, which made the mystery of this cornfield even deeper. However, one day when we were not quite teenagers a fire had started in the cornfield and a decent patch had burnt. After the fire department put it out it seemed the owners had enough and were finally ready to cash in on their land. Today it is a condo complex with alot of people living there. They're actually decent places as well.

Later on in life we learned the true story of how that fire actually got started. A young man, who will only be identified as Phoof E. Schinggles was playing with his "friend" who'll we call "The Harvester". Phoof and the Harvester, apparnetly didnt have much going on, so decided to play with some matches. Eventually they're litte experiment got out of hand, the corn burnt quite fast, condos were built, and Phoof spent thousands on therapy trying to forget the whole affair. It was so traumatic that he and The Harvester never spoke again, for fear they would spark an inquiry. Today the land is known as Phoof's Folly.

And why do I bring this up? Because of the line in "All Medicated Geniuses":

There's a kid with a golden arm
He admits to the forest fire
That he started up from a lack of something better going on

Tell your friends it's a four alarm
Just a smoke screen we're all liars
Better to stew in discontent then to admit we’re wrong

Our motivations out to sea
And our ideas they die so quickly

This town has good hearts
Bad blood, emotional scars
Never gettin to say what you really wanna say

We all lie so well

Another fact: the band's name was derived from a Morrisey tune. They sound nothing like Morrisey.

More Pretty Girls Make music can be found here