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“There’s a million dollar man/ with a dime store sun tan/ beggin’ me to sign away my will,” sings The Proud Flesh frontman Patrick Dalton in the first seconds of “Fanfare for the Pathetic Loser,” a slight edge to his voice stretching over a jaunty guitar. “He’s droppin’ 50 dollar words/ off at the local blood bank/ written on a seven dollar bill.”
Around the lyrics — disarmingly sweet as they delve into serial deception, xenophobia, and some serious political mud-slinging from one particular Cheeto-faced presidential candidate — a tired scene emerges. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are trying their best to hold it together at campaign appearances, rallies, town hall meetings and debates. In the Trump camp, limbs fly as the candidate speaks, Hillary Clinton becomes a nasty woman, Tim Kaine turns into “a joke!,” and China — the whole country — is “terrible!” and threatening.
That kind of speech wasn’t just in Dalton’s head; it’s what he was watching unravel before him as an unprecedented political campaign season got underway in late 2015. He had a thought: Perhaps it was taxing to listen to Donald Trump. But the candidate, whom he found bombastic to a fault, was also perfect material for an election-themed song.
The Proud Flesh released the song Monday night, on the eve of the election that inspired it.
Click on the above audio file to listen to it.
A sense of fortuitous Elm City timing helped him will that thought into reality. “Fanfare for the Pathetic Loser” started in earnest last November, when Cafe Nine hosted a songwriting contest around the lyrics “there is no California anymore.” As someone who sees himself as “disconnected from the political caste” but never shies away from political discussion and has a deep love for lyricism and a good metaphor where he can find it, Dalton wondered if he could fuse what he was watching on television — then a race into primary season, with over 10 candidates on the Republican side, shouting over each other to be heard —with the notion of America’s glittering, curious and elusive West Coast.
“The national conventions hadn’t happened yet, but the election campaign had already been ongoing for many months, and its ugliness had been weighing on me,” he said in an interview with the Independent. “I started using the idea of California as a sort of metaphor for American idealism. There was a sense of national derailment; that we had lost something that we weren’t going to get back. And … there is something almost timeless and Shakespearean about Trump’s character, which makes him great fodder for art.”
As the state’s assets and geography doubled as political metaphor (and with a few nods to lyrical role models like Joni Mitchell), Dalton and the band got to business. Trains stopped running on time. Dreams got stuck, deferred, and soured. The earth and its gifts turned rancid. The group was on the right track.
“This land is your land /better strike up the band/ ‘cause there is no California anymore,” he wailed wistfully in one iteration. The line stuck.
“By the time I had a couple verses down I realized I was pretty much writing a protest song,” he added. He was wary of the genre: Protest songs are time sensitive; they risk losing their punch if they last too long in the hopper. But he and bandmates Alex Burnet, Sam Carlson, and Jon Watanabe wanted to stick with it.
As they worked through the recording, smoothing out the track, members of the group found that it was a small way to work through with Election Day jitters. They’re hoping it will work that way for other New Haveners too — while reminding them to get out there and vote.
“The influence of the current political climate is certainly something that comes through — as it should,” said Dalton.
That doesn’t mean the song has let him rest easy on the eve of voting.
“I think the best-case outcome of this presidential election is more of the same, which is of course preferable to everything getting worse, but still disappointing as a culmination of 18 months of bombardment on the American psyche,” he said.
