the sound Precious and real and Ooo that's nice

Doug Fieger, best known as lead singer and songwriter for The Knack, of "My Sharona" fame, underwent brain surgery recently. Much to my surprise, I find I care. Not because of "My Sharona," that's always seemed second-rate to me.

But because I only learned recently that he wrote a couple of English lyrics for The Manhattan Transfer's Brasil, their homage to songwriters of the region. I first saw the video for one of the songs, "Soul Food To Go," as part of a continuous loop playing on the monitors of a plane. That was about to start my journey to Tennessee.

The lyrics are complete dada if read (see headline above). I found this about why in an online article from Goldmine:

One of the tracks on Brasil, "Soul Food To Go," a duet between Tim Hauser and Brazilian songwriter Djavan, received major airplay on adult contemporary stations. The English lyrics for "Soul Food To Go" were written by, of all people, former Knack frontman Doug Fieger. "Doug Fieger had been over to my house visiting," said Tim. "He was trying to be friendly, and I said, 'We got a couple of songs here, and we've got to get writers to do them.' We just came back from Brazil, and we've been talking to Djavan over dinner, and Djavan said, 'The way you want to write my material, my suggestion is when you listen to my tunes, when you hear an English word that sounds like a Portuguese word that I'm singing, write that English word down and then just keep listening until you hear another English-sounding word. Then connect the words by a stream of consciousness, try to find the relationships through abstract thinking.'

"And both Doug and I found that very interesting. And he said, 'Can I take a crack at that?'

When heard sung they're almost unbelivably cool. Check this out. I apologize in advance because the video's kind of cheesy; an obvious knock-off of Better Off Dead (and Tim Hauser looks just like Veronica Mars' dad)...



...but I don't apologize for loving the song. Along with Jimmy Cliff's "I Can See Clearly Now" (also on the same loop), it became a source of great comfort to me during those arduous journeys back-and-forth to The Land of Unhappiness.

So get well soon, Fieger.