the brief

when just plain gossip ain’t enough, try a wee bit of shake’n bake

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Most karosongs are serious but funi-flavour songs are not by definition. Still, even if it's hard to discern, most funi- songs do have a point.

I started listening to Jesse Cook's Shake on youtube somewhere in early 2019, but found it hard to figure out for months. Another case where my idiot musant brain only heard an indecipherable wall of music.

My first real sense of a song to go with it was that it would be about people using social media to create 'personas' not quite based — you might say — in their lived reality. Which could have been a good song and a fun piece of social commentary but was not to be.

It was instead a song about gossip. But not just any old gossip.

You could call it performance gossip.

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did you hear about Uncle Charley?
went down to the beach
exposed himself to some woman
she just giggled so he went home

now that's the kind of tawdry tale
often passed as gossip
but it's really just reportage
it could be so much better

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did you hear about Sir Charles
down along the promenade?
he was advertising his wares with a flourish
when lady gaga gamboled along, guffawed

"seen better done better, sir,
put it away and get yourself home"

so he did. and did you see what I did there?

i took the same basic facts, added a little spice
you know made it more fun
and i'm not the only one

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Multiple voices added a whole new challenge, so the chorus was the first section to solidify lyrically. Unlike most karosongs, which name themselves before the lyrics start pumping forward, I only knew this song's title once I'd got the chorus.

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you see what we do. . .

is take a bit of our lives
add a little spice
shake'n bake it real nice

share it round the table
share it anytime we're together
with those friends and neighbours
who agree with us a little spice makes life nice

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With the lyrics for the opening verses and chorus in hand, the song's structure was apparent. I could see that it would have another two verses, each it's own piece of performance gossip, each with it's own voice. And I had a growing sense of what those stories would be, even bits and pieces of the lyrics, but they remained indistinct all the way through the summer and fall of 2019.

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oh and did you hear about Paddy the Pontypool piddler?
widdled a puddle on his waddle to the middle of the road
got nicked for drunken urinalliteration

so they called his brother paddy the fiddler
to come pick him up but he was too fiddled

so they called his other brother paddy the widdler
but he was — yeah, too widdled
yeah yeah you got the pattern, good for you

look they can't all be extraordinary
and if you get nothing better
alliteration's the new reiteration

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The third verse clarified long before the second.

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and did you hear about Lady Margaret down there on Byng
that's right, the one with the alien husband
with the green eyes that's right

not bad looking really, in fact a few of the ladies
were maybe a little jealous of Margaret
but certainly not enough to kill her

eh? i didn't say Margaret was dead?
silly me . . . i buried the headline

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An aspect of my musical disability is that sometimes I just cannot get otherwise small bits of a song. This is perhaps most common with transitions from verse to chorus, especially what I call 'jumpups' where the vocal leads the music into the transition (no doubt there's a music term for this; I just don't know what it is).

Shake'n bake included jumpups into the first two choruses but not the third. There it was the music that led the vocal. So I knew what the first two transitions needed to do, even knew what the lyrics should be ("so what we do"). But I couldn't work out how to jumpup that line to lead the music, and kept lumping it into the chorus, making that too rushed.

It took months and months, long after the rest of the song was mastered and well into the whole/full karo period, to get those two bloody little jumpups.

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Post-script

All three 'stories' in this song include personal references that have no bearing on the song's meaning but always give me a titter.

"Uncle Charley" was what we called my maternal grandmother's second husband. I lived near a town called Pontypool during my high school years. And "Lady Margaret down there on Byng" references my own mom and the street where I was born in Toronto's east end.

Contrary to the lyrics, my father was not an alien and did not have green eyes.

That I know of.