Mat D. and the Profane Saints
Drinking Wine and Sipping Tea
from "Small Town Burning"
2006
You get all types of songwriters. Some write sugary pop songs (for sugary pop acts like the Sugababes), some write depressing dirges and some write screenplays that fit into 3 minutes and 29 seconds. Not the screenplay for a Hollywood blockbuster mind you but for an arthouse classic. "Drinking Wine and Sipping Tea" could easily be the screenplay to a Jim Jarmusch movie. Hey, you can even see Tom Waits having a cameo role in it.
Now this a cautionary tale of moral depravity - "… a man who kissed his cousin will surely lie down with a dozen dirty sailors drinking gin and sipping tea" containing some very neatly drawn characters like Woody who is "… as glory bound as any Oklahoma boy" and smells of "… lye soap, cigarettes and gasoline. Now these are the kind of people that you know exist in your more esoteric movies but you hope that you would never meet in real life. A character called Jimmy Pistolero experiences the dangers of playing with guns and he too is drawn into the spiralling depravity. There is something quite refreshing, however, about it all as there is just too much love in your average song (and that might explain where all the love that should be out in the world has gone) and this redresses the balance. Sharply performed with just the right amount of dark humour, this is the kind of song that kicks off theme parties. You might think that it would be a mean spirited song but that dark humour actually gives it warmth.
Available on their album "Small Town Burning" and on the "Mermaid" EP. Also downloadable as an MP3 from CD Baby.