I’ve been in a retrospective mood of late because I’ve been exhuming material from the Mysterious Production of Eggs era, working on a 20th anniversary box set. I say “era” because the making of this album was a saga spanning four years, 2001-2005. It took three fully recorded albums to get to the Eggs you all know. Read more about that here. Today, we’re talking MX Missiles.
This one is pretty dark so I think I should mostly leave it alone. Let’s just say at some point you stop obsessing over your own torment in middle school and realize that everyone was struggling, even the bullies, though sometimes it would take a desperate act of self-harm on their part to see that they were human in the first place.
Another anecdote regarding calcium while we’re here: when I was in high school biology class we watched a video showing chemists in lab coats slicing pure calcium with razor blades. I found it very… arousing in the way that teenagers who often don’t know where to direct that energy, can get excited. There’s a very funny stand-up bit from Jenny Slate who as a horny teenager sees a picture of a mountain and says “that looks like something!!!” It was probably more about the girl in front of me that I had a crush on than the calcium that looked like water chestnuts. I use it in this song as something appealing but deadly for if you were to put it in your mouth it would react with saliva and produce calcium hydroxide.
That’s just one of many layers including ROTC, 4th of July parades, Desert Storm, a quote from Frank Zappa and Lead Belly homage, astro turf and sawdust.
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