Ever since I was a little kid there have been situations and circumstances that have forced me zig and zag so that I can stay happy, healthy and prosperous. When I wrote this song, I and my wife and kid had just been through 7 years of non stop challenges. We were attacked by the austerity that was imposed after the financial collapse. It wasn't personal, millions of people suffered this while government tried to regain the public money it used to bail out banks by getting it back from hard working people. It made no sense.
In our case it just seemed relentless. First the German government wouldn’t let us get married so I couldn’t put my wife on the health insurance and I had to pay full cost for the birth of our child. Then they taxed me as a single man and further emptied my bank account, after they locked me out of it, to get what they called "unpaid back taxes". I actually hadn’t turned any sort of profit since 2007, but artists in Germany are asked to pay “provisional tax”, a speculative tax on what THEY think you might earn. More unfair money grabbing.
In 2012, shortly after my daughter was born, I got a job a Cirque du Soleil. While completely not my style, I figured taking a job like that would save us. It was supposed to pay really well. It turned out to be a corporate nightmare that further drained what little resources we had left when they cancelled my contract for no explicable reason and left us stranded in Las Vegas.
We were so broke I had to crowd fund our escape from America. We had only been there 3 months and had managed to ring up a $30,000 debt from having to pay bonds and guarantees for an apartment and a car because I wasn’t an American. We came to understand pretty quickly how predatory American society is. It's open season on anyone who goes there. You have to be loaded with cash and ready to protect yourself.
After escaping to Vancouver Canada, I spent four years working as an extra for 12 to 16 hours a day on film sets and busking the Granville Island Market, which had become a mere shadow of itself in terms of earning, 20 years after I first worked there.
I ran a boutique custom song service from my desktop through an online micro Gig portal that cost me more in hardware and physical distress than I actually earned. Then, in 2017, my wife broke her two front teeth and we were about to go from being $6000 in debt to $21,000 in debt, just to fix her teeth.
That’s when we decided to leave Canada and go back to the bus in Germany to see if it was still working. We had to “duck and weave’ around the forces of the free market economy to regain control of our lives, give up high priced rent and see if living in a bus would help us put money in the bank.
Turns out it did. Not much, but much more than we had up until that point.
We have been living in the bus for three years.
lyrics
All these things coming at me
I gotta duck and weave, gotta duck and weave
to survive this whirligig
I will have to pull some magic out of my sleeve
Ain't no telling how it goes
Where this will stop well, hey, no one knows
Watch out
It could you in the head
And then you’ll fall down go boom be dead
Then into the after life
Oops not there
What happened?
Well maybe not enough prayer
All that heaven shit
I’m a pagan,
I’ll have none of it
False gods
sure okay
Well I’m sorry
but I don’t pray that way
It’s all chance
Don’t waste your time
just get up and dance
get up and dance
get up and dance
get up and dance
oh way
oh way
oh way oh way oh way….etc
away away away away
credits
from The Yin and Yang of All Things,
released April 18, 2020
Music and Lyrics by David Cassel
Bass by Ilias "The Mad Greek"Vasileiadis
Writer, musician, comedian, director and performer. Creator of Space Commander, The Ukulele Bandito, Complainerman, The DCP
and a bunch of films and videos that not many people have seen because he has been too busy making stuff and not engaging in advertising. That last part has changed now....more
Post-punk in the Sonic Youth mold—melody covered by creeping fuzz, anchored by architectural rhythms, with lyrics both abstract and direct. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 5, 2019