I grew up listening to comedy albums. I listened to them enough to have some comedian’s routines memorized. It would be hard to not be influenced by some of these routines even when they weren’t the most spiritual stories. Here are three songs that I can site direct influences from comedy routines.
I have talked about writing It’s Gonna Rain in a previous blog post. When I decided to do a video for this song, I turned to my son for help. He was in charge of filming and editing all of my live action videos including the ones for Arkansas and Electric Jesus. I decided to replicate the construction on a very small scale with footage of making a paper boat. We needed to test the boat so I decided the best test would be in a large tub that we normally use at parties to ice down drinks. One of the challenges for any video shoot that involves rain is getting it to show up. We included footage of an actual rain shower at our house and I was impressed that it showed up so well. We hoped to get some shots of it “raining” on the boat. The rain would be water from a hose. The rain effect didn’t work. It destroyed one of the boats that we made for the shoot. We decided to just so the boat swirling around as the tub was filled with water.
In autumn of 2009, it seems like it rained every day. It was raining so much, I thought that it might be about time to build an ark. This is when I got the idea of writing a song about Noah. The main idea for the song was to write about Noah talking about how his neighbors reacted to his ark building. The idea for the tune came quickly. The chorus of the song was also relatively easy to write. The verses came slower and the song sat half written for a while.