December 20, 2017

Minor Secrets of "More than Toast" Revealed!

When you make a sacrifice you're supposed to get a wish... another one of these from '98. T

he kernel of this song was just the idea of playing around with metaphors for love and loss and such, and it evolved into an unstated hypothesis that you can plug just about anything (e.g. "staplegun") into these kinds of statements with no erosion of emotional meaning for all their absurdity. Eh, it's hard to explain. It's never a good idea to try to explain a song: just listen to it (if you want.)

The other element was the old Les Paul Jr. and Marshall half stack I'd lately acquired, which stimulated a nice run of pretty good songwriting. "More than Toast" and "Swallow Everything" (another metaphor deconstruction song, in a way, I guess) were the first songs I wrote using this machinery. More on that general situation here.

Anyway, while "More than Toast" is by no means perfect as a song, it does do pretty much everything it's supposed to do without going too far off the rails, rare for me at the time and harder to achieve than you'd think.

The dating in the lyrics is accurate: the spirit of '91 indeed. Because of that metaphor stuff, I've always thought of "She's Not a Flower" as a kind sequel to it. But I guess everything's a sequel to everything else in a sort of way but not really.

This is one of the most popular tunes in the songbook, #1 in fact if you go by an informal poll conducted on my blog quite some time ago in response to a query about what should be on an MTX best of comp. (The compilation never did come together, though it may yet in future, and we'll probably do another kind of poll for that.) The song was featured on the soundtrack of the NCAA 06 Football video game, and many people I've spoken to have said they became fans after hearing us for the first time in that format. That is indeed probably the furthest "reach" any of my tunes has had. Whatever works, ya know? This is the tenth posted out of 16 songs in that set, by the way.

Posted by Dr. Frank at December 20, 2017 05:14 PM