Electric Jesus – artwheelermusic.com

When I decided to do a promotional video for Electric Jesus, I wanted to wait until the Christmas season to get footage of yards decorated with blow molded nativity scenes. I also decided I might like to purchase my own Electric Jesus to feature in the video. Jackson, Tennessee has a lot of shopping options so I thought would be able to easily find a nativity scene. This wasn’t as easy as I thought. Many retailers don’t carry any of these items anymore because I guess they don’t sell as many. I saw some on-line but I didn’t want to wait for them to ship. I decided to make a road trip to Memphis with my family to see what we could find there. We found a store there that had cartons and cartons of Electric Jesus. They didn’t have as many of the other pieces of the nativity scene. We took video of this shopping trip that we used for the early part of the video.

Writing Electric Jesus

It was the Christmas season and I was driving through in my neighborhood with some of my kids on the way to church. I saw an old blow molded nativity scene in one of the yards and the phrase came to me: “Shine on Electric Jesus! Shine on!” This was the start of writing this song.

I decided to do a slow reveal for the first verse of the song. The first line set the tone for the song. “Your head and your body are made out of plastic”. When I perform this live for people that have never heard it before, I tell them that I’m going to sing a Christmas song. This first line doesn’t sound anything like what you would expect from the typical Christmas song. It’s not “dashing through the snow” or “sleigh bells ring, are you listening”. The word plastic is abrupt, almost industrial and isn’t going to rhyme with anything fun. The verse is written as a puzzle to get the listener to try and figure out what I’m singing about. I describe properties of the Electric Jesus that you usually don’t think about. You might be able to figure it out by the time I’m talking about using it to decorate the lawn. The final reveal is the chorus.