Many are the songs in my anthology that were inspired by great big fat famous songs, and here's another one. "Their Way" is obviously a turn on Frank Sinatra's "My Way."

The original lyrics for this probably date back to the late 90's. At some point, being a huge fan of what I called "Geezer Radio"—that golden music of the 40s, 50's, and 60s—I must have been enjoying "My Way" too much and thought, "What a fucking lie. Nobody does that. Nobody I know does that. I don't do that. Whenever the pressure's on to conform, I jump right in line and do it their way. Ha! That'll be MY theme song...'Their Way'..." And then, like Dewey Cox, I stopped and said, "Heyyy...." and wrote me a song.

One notable word in the lyrics is "parfait,' as in "...facing force feeding/from Defeat's parfait..." I'm not sure what that word actually means, but as a child in the 70s, I read it in one of my mom's magazines and I've carried it around ever since. There was a recipe for something called "Sunshine Parfait." Had a lot of diced peaches and pears and such, I seem to recall. Now—looking it up in Wikipedia for the very first time ever—I see the definition: "Parfait is a French word literally meaning 'perfect' commonly employed to describe a kind of frozen dessert." Wow. Couldn't be more 'parfait' in describing the kind of dish failure serves up socially.

It's a great album opener, pulsing right along as the drone bass jangles along and the high guitar keens away at its own counter-melody. I love this song, but I can't think of anyone ever writing in to say it was a favorite. The mp3 always downloaded in the bottom half of my catalog, for whatever that's worth.