One Track Mind: Ted Leo, "The World is in the Turlet"

POSTED: Tuesday, June 10, 2008, 4:24 PM

Filed Under: Music

It was supposed to be my moment of triumph!

I can't get this song out of my head, it's so weird and misshapen and catchy. "The World is in the Turlet" was composed by Ted Leo in about two hours after Tom Scharpling (of WFMU's The Best Show) and his listeners cobbled together some lyrics. I'm confident in the skills of Ted Leo and his hairy Pharmacists — they broke into "Day Man" last time they played Philly — but as the show proceeded, things kinda rambled forward with little regard for meter, and I was pretty skeptical:

Big Steve is on the drum set
Counting it four by four
Little Jimmy jamming the six-string
Giving the people more

Count Violence bringing the low-end
Cuz that's all that he knows what to do
And my name's Ted
That's what I said

Nuts. But, thanks to a big chanting chorus (from which the song derives it's title) and Ted Leo's sheer enthusiasm for the project, the song ended up strangely classic sounding. More than that, it almost feels like it has a point. See verse two:

Nothing to drink I've got nothing to eat
I'm barely alive I'm dead on my feet
The East River boiled and belched up a cadaver
The corpse walked to Enid's for a drink and some palaver

Really nuts. But it really rocks. Listen.

[audio:http://stream.citypaper.net/music/theworldisintheturlet.mp3]

Hear how the song came about here.

Posted by Patrick Rapa @ 4:24 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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