Narratus Interruptus

First: Happy Belated Thanksgiving!!!!

On to today's record. I find this one very curious and fairly fascinating. On the surface, it's another tossed-off sounding Mike Thomas number, with the unwieldy title of "Early One Morn at a Quarter to Ten", but upon listening to its lyrics, it sounds to me as if half the story is missing - almost as if the second page of the lyricist's submission got lost on its way to becoming a song.

Because the first 104 seconds of the story (all we have here) set up the situation: the singer's buddy quit his job five years ago, and that friend tells his reasons, most of which have to working his tail off, only have the government take their allotted share.

And that's it. First, I'm dubious that the lyricist wouldn't have known his "friend" had stopped working for five years (it seems to be offered as a surprising bit of news), but more importantly, where is the punchline? The rest of the story? The explanation of what the friend has been doing instead for five years? What happened to the house?

Maybe there's a part two somewhere?

Download: Mike Thomas - Early One Morn at a Quarter to Ten
Play:


On the flip side is a genuinely sweet set of words about the lyricist's son, titled "See Him". I'm not crazy about the setting that the TPA folks attached to this lyric, and I don't think Mike Thomas was anywhere near up to the task of meeting the emotional level of these words, but they don't really ruin it, either, and the results are fairly affecting, despite the flaws.

Download: Mike Thomas - See Him
Play: