Here’s today’s link to the fourth track from Super Brain:
Consumerism is available online as an mp3 with accompanying lyrics. (Ben Sommer, voice). Original September premiere at Young Americans for Liberty.
Sommer talks about the song:
I wrote it in 1997, in the downtown branch of the San Diego Public Library. I was out west for 2 months to see Milne Ongley, an ancient and maverick physician who got famous a few years ago successfully treating US Olympic skiers and their bad knees. He was so non-mainstream he worked out of Ensenada, Mexico, commuting back and forth between there and his San Diego home. Since I was a fearful young gringo at the time, I did the same and spent the 5 days of every week I wasn’t receiving treatment for a desperate case of tendinitis and spine pain up in San Diego youth hostels. I found Ongley after a two-year long quest for a cure for my joint problems that prematurely ended my promising classical guitar career.
So, while injured I promoted my secondary musical interest – composition – and set my sights on graduate school. Boston University had a PhD program (in music!), and one key requirement was an “academic” composition. So I whiled away a week among the homeless and insane derelicts who slept at the reading tables in the SD library, studying baroque counterpoint and Bach’s fugues, and turned out this little ditty. The gratuitous addition of the lyric “Shopping” came later. So much work spent on this piece that it seemed a shame to never record it.
P.S. I was fully cured and have never looked back. As you can hear from my albums, my guitar chops are fully recovered. Oh, and BU rejected me 🙂
Enjoy.
Visit Ben’s official website at BenSommer.com.