KING FOR A DAY .... FOOL FOR A LIFETIME 20 | #2
Our KING FOR DAY....FOOL FOR A LIFE TIME 20th celebrations continue with an in depth look at all the songs featured on the album. Enjoy.
1. Get out.
MUSIC | PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON
MIKE BORDIN | 1995
"Patton wrote drums, bass, guitar, that's his song. To me, that sounds like a FNM song, and it's supposed to work that way. That's real gratifying and that's a big part of why we're still here"
BILL GOULD | 1996
"Patton thinks in a way that I wouldn't it's actually good for me because I would never have done what I end up doing. When you move your fingers in a way that you wouldn't normally, and you get used to it and it becomes natural, then you have a whole new way of going about things. For example, the song 'Get Out' on our last record, he did the bass part and I'm thinking, What the hell is that? What notes is he playing? Why would anybody want to even think of that?' I learned it and realised it was actually really simple, just a different- way of looking at playing the instrument."
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2. Ricochet.
MUSIC | GOULD , BORDIN, PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON
Second single released from the album on May 1st 1995. Reached 27 in the UK charts, 58 in Australia.
From OLD FNM:
"Homeboy" by Seth Morgan, contains this phrase: "Just got to where I had to run as fast as I could to stay in one place. To get anywhere, I had to run twice as fast." which strongly resembles Ricochet's "Runnin twice as fast to stay in the same place."
RODDY BOTTUM | 1995
"It was written the day that Kurt died. That's just why it was called "Nirvana." (Pause.) I like that one. The vocal harmonies are really really great. And those are my favourite lyrics on the record."
MIKE BORDIN | 1995
MUSIC | GOULD , BORDIN, PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON
Second single released from the album on May 1st 1995. Reached 27 in the UK charts, 58 in Australia.
From OLD FNM:
"Homeboy" by Seth Morgan, contains this phrase: "Just got to where I had to run as fast as I could to stay in one place. To get anywhere, I had to run twice as fast." which strongly resembles Ricochet's "Runnin twice as fast to stay in the same place."
RODDY BOTTUM | 1995
"It was written the day that Kurt died. That's just why it was called "Nirvana." (Pause.) I like that one. The vocal harmonies are really really great. And those are my favourite lyrics on the record."
MIKE BORDIN | 1995
"That's my favourite song. I was sort of a fuckin' weasel, and... that wasn't gonna be on the record, but that song turned out so great that it pushed another song off the record. I think it sounds great, I love that song. I really love the choruses, where it gets really big, and it really takes off... I love that song. And that was the last song we wrote, as well. That was the 20th song that we wrote for this record. So I think it's really fitting that the first song that we wrote for the record and the last song that we wrote are both on it."
NME | February 1995
Several lyrics on 'King' seem to snarl against the trap of celebrity, entrapment and the ageing process. But Patton dismisses any suggestion that the Kurt Cobain saga had any effect on him ("I didn't know him or anything").
As a singer in a rock n roll band who may have gone through some of the same things that he did, you had no thoughts or feeling about the whole business?
"What can I say? (Laughs). What can I say? I'm sorry? Bad things happen, y'know? I'm sure it wasn't as great as everyone thinks it was."
What wasn't?
"His suicide, I'm sure wasn't such a glamorous event."
VIDEO | Directed by Alex Hemming | Filmed at L'Elysee Monmartre Paris | April 5th 1995.
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3. Evidence.
MUSIC | GOULD, BORDIN, SPRUANCE
LYIRCS | PATTON
The third single released on July 17th 1995 in the UK, it reached 32 in the UK charts, 27 in Australia and 5 in Finland.
RODDY BOTTUM | 1995
"I like that song, it's pretty different for us. It's very laid back, groovy. There are some real strings on it, the punctuating sort of strings... a sort of Soul II Soul vibe."
CMJ New Music Monthly | APRIL 1995:
Patton starts cakling--a high, weird Tex Avery laugh more animated than his surreal singing personas--and the effect is more unsettling than seeing him mad. Perhaps he is mad, and Faith No More fans are mere visitors to a sort of traveling asylum. After all, why would a rational human being leave a trail of droppings across U.S. stages for hapless clean up crews to discover? And is that what this "scat" singer is celebrating alongside Bottum's soothing-but-funkified keys on "Evidence"? "Step beside the piece of circumstance/ Got to wash away the taste of evidence," he groans, painting a visceral but nonetheless stomach-churing picture.
MIKE PATTON | 1997
"We've always wanted to write a great pop song, evidence is just that. I think we needed to lose a guitarist to achieve the end result."
VIDEO | Directed by Walter Stern
Patton starts cakling--a high, weird Tex Avery laugh more animated than his surreal singing personas--and the effect is more unsettling than seeing him mad. Perhaps he is mad, and Faith No More fans are mere visitors to a sort of traveling asylum. After all, why would a rational human being leave a trail of droppings across U.S. stages for hapless clean up crews to discover? And is that what this "scat" singer is celebrating alongside Bottum's soothing-but-funkified keys on "Evidence"? "Step beside the piece of circumstance/ Got to wash away the taste of evidence," he groans, painting a visceral but nonetheless stomach-churing picture.
"I, uh, don't remember, I claim ignorance," Patton weasels when quizzed about the track. "I wrote the song and that's enough--you have fun with it. I don't have to tell you shit." The point exactly. Oddly enough, he doesn't shy away from this purloined-doodle rumours. "You do what you gotta do to get you through," he explains. It sounds quite logical. "It's like , you're a musician, right? You wake up at 2:00 in the afternoon, you don't have any responsibilities, you don't have any certainties in your life, other than the fact that you're gonna play that night. So you may as well throw a couple of others in there, something to look forward to."
Bordin seems to understand his teammate's curious credo. "But we don't like living in the past," he chortles. "We've gotta find some new habits to do this time around."
"I'm gonna leave part of my colon behind this time," Patton declares. "Yeah!" Bordin responds. "It'll look like little pieces of sausage casing!" Then the duo breaks into happy hysterics, infatuated with its own morbid sense of humour. But Bordin--a founding father of Faith No More along with Bottum and Gould (Patton clambered about on Real Thing, the band's third release)--suddenly stops laughing, turns poker-faced serious about the tell-tale "Evidence" cut. "That's the one I'm most proud of," he says. "All the loud songs turned out really great on this album, really aggressive, and we've always done that really well. But the smoother songs I've never felt we've gotten exactly right. And this one is pretty damn close to being *exactly* right."'
MIKE PATTON | 1997
"We've always wanted to write a great pop song, evidence is just that. I think we needed to lose a guitarist to achieve the end result."
VIDEO | Directed by Walter Stern
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4. The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies.
MUSIC | GOULD, BORDIN, PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON
MIKE PATTON | 1995
MUSIC | GOULD, BORDIN, PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON
MIKE PATTON | 1995
"Ha ha. Oh my god! My favorite thing, especially on this record, is to write lyrics and not tell the band what I'm singing, and then have them guess what I'm singing. Usually they go, 'Are you saying what I think you're saying?' and it's better than what I wrote. So I just use what they wrote instead. Instead of the word 'horn' it's supposed to be 'hole', and 'came' is not in there either. But I didn't wanna correct you, because it's just too beautiful."
MIKE PATTON | 1995
"Yeah, but that is meant ironically, I think. Ehh... we all have friends in other bands. "Friends". I have a number of musician-friends whose records I don't want to hear. I say to them: "No, you don't want me to hear your new album, I want us to stay friends". Worst of all is when you meet people whose music you've always hated, and to add to the misfortune, they turn out to be cool people. Aaargh. Very painful. Barry Manilow was one of them."
VIDEO | The Forum | March 13th, 1995
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5. Star A.D.
MUSIC | GOULD, BORDIN , PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON, GOULD
'When you die......You'll become something worse than dead.....You'll be become a Legend'
Taken from the 1965 French film 'Alphaville' directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
TREY SPRUANCE | 1995
MUSIC | GOULD, BORDIN , PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON, GOULD
'When you die......You'll become something worse than dead.....You'll be become a Legend'
Taken from the 1965 French film 'Alphaville' directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
TREY SPRUANCE | 1995
"I like the chords that the horn guys did during the verses; they sound really thick. That's my favorite part. That and that little spy section... That's a nice little breath of fresh air. It opens up into a space that the album never touches upon anywhere else."
MIKE PATTON | 1995
"Kurt? God no! It's about a phenomenon. And if that guy happened to be one, I don't know. It's one of those things that happen; it's a Vegas thing. What could be more shameful than having to change your colostomy bag on stage?! Vegas is great, though. I love it. Welcome to America."
BILL GOULD | 1995
"The guitar solo is like Saturday Night Live, that's the vibe. It's so funny because we try to explain to people that we write songs visually. We think of scenes and that's exactly what we wanted to do. We kind of amuse ourselves and that's cool because it means we're growing as musicians"
VIDEO | Maquinaria Festival, Chile | November 12th 2011
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6. Cuckoo For Caca.
MUSIC | GOULD, PATTON, SPRUANCE
LYRICS | PATTON
MIKE BORDIN | 1995
"Cuckoo for Caca, which is a silly title for a heavy song, but the working title, the fake name, that everybody knows that song under - it was called The First Song."
.
"That song is about the shit that we've gone through in the past five years."
.
"That song is about the shit that we've gone through in the past five years."
VIDEO | SWU Music & Arts Festival | Brazil | November 14th 2011
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7. Caralho Voador.
MUSIC | GOULD, PATTON ,BORDIN
LYRICS | GOULD, PATTON, BORDIN
From OLD FNM:
Both the title of the song and a small section of it are in Portuguese.
The title Caralho Voador translates to "Flying Dick". The Portuguese verses original lyrics are not written with the correct spelling. Here is the original verse, the corrected version, and the English version of the part.
Original Lyrics - In "REAL" Portuguese - In literal English
Eo non posso dirigir - Eu não posso dirigir - I can't drive
E agora a pares - E agora aparece - And now show-up
Neo dedu indehado - Meu dedo enterrado - My finger buried
No neo naris - No meu nariz - In my nose
When the English translation is rewritten into proper English, the translation is something like this:
"Flying Dick"
I can't drive
And now my index finger
Shows up in my nose.
Both the title of the song and a small section of it are in Portuguese.
The title Caralho Voador translates to "Flying Dick". The Portuguese verses original lyrics are not written with the correct spelling. Here is the original verse, the corrected version, and the English version of the part.
Original Lyrics - In "REAL" Portuguese - In literal English
Eo non posso dirigir - Eu não posso dirigir - I can't drive
E agora a pares - E agora aparece - And now show-up
Neo dedu indehado - Meu dedo enterrado - My finger buried
No neo naris - No meu nariz - In my nose
When the English translation is rewritten into proper English, the translation is something like this:
"Flying Dick"
I can't drive
And now my index finger
Shows up in my nose.
MIKE PATTON | 1995
"I think we're just getting better at imitating, because that's what it is. Us hearing a bossanova thing, that's not bossanova. You gotta make that distinction. Just picture a guy who's a really bad driver, tha's kind of what it's about"
VIDEO | Super Rock Festival | Lisbon | July 9th 1995
VIDEO | Super Rock Festival | Lisbon | July 9th 1995
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8. Ugly In The Morning.
MUSIC | PATTON, SPRUANCE, GOULD
LYRICS | PATTON
MUSIC | PATTON, SPRUANCE, GOULD
LYRICS | PATTON
METAL SUCKS REVIEW | 2011.
Key lyric ”I did it to myself again!”
Single? No. Super no.
The climate
Up to King For A Day, the men of Faith No More seemed gleeful in their depiction of life as a continuous depanting (with occasional blows to vital organs); even when tone turned serious, FNM lyrics stuck to firmly outsized metaphor and to surrogates who battle inertia and cosmic forces for survival. But 1995′s King For A Day replaced tales of hapless, outmatched anti-heroes with stark, scary personal close-ups of human-sized problems. To me Faith No More is cinema, so let’s look at it this way: If pre-1995 FNM was a wide, bright, graceful crane shot capturing the many strains of earthly desperation among the walking dead, then King onward is a grainy handheld shot of a sick man, seated, staring at a clock, crying.
Awesome song elevated to supra-awesomeness by momentum, delirium, mania, and collapse. On paper, “Ugly” might read like a jokey novelty, but in FNM’s hands, the jam is a lurching tour de force that promptly loses its footing down the front steps. At its center wobbles a helpless vomiteer who awakes to a harshly-lit staredown with his own drug dementia. Fittingly, “Ugly”‘s chorus isn’t exactly melodious, but its verses/pre-choruses invert the “Epic” rhythmic-rapping-to-ringing-
Didja know? Dude, it looks like the place to party with King For A Day is Western Europe and the Southeastern Hemisphere, where the album camped out in the top ten for around three months (!) and six months (!!), respectively. Meanwhile in the U.S., King peaked at 31 during two months on the albums chart. Sarcastic slow clap, America
Key lyric ”I did it to myself again!”
Single? No. Super no.
The climate
Up to King For A Day, the men of Faith No More seemed gleeful in their depiction of life as a continuous depanting (with occasional blows to vital organs); even when tone turned serious, FNM lyrics stuck to firmly outsized metaphor and to surrogates who battle inertia and cosmic forces for survival. But 1995′s King For A Day replaced tales of hapless, outmatched anti-heroes with stark, scary personal close-ups of human-sized problems. To me Faith No More is cinema, so let’s look at it this way: If pre-1995 FNM was a wide, bright, graceful crane shot capturing the many strains of earthly desperation among the walking dead, then King onward is a grainy handheld shot of a sick man, seated, staring at a clock, crying.
Awesome song elevated to supra-awesomeness by momentum, delirium, mania, and collapse. On paper, “Ugly” might read like a jokey novelty, but in FNM’s hands, the jam is a lurching tour de force that promptly loses its footing down the front steps. At its center wobbles a helpless vomiteer who awakes to a harshly-lit staredown with his own drug dementia. Fittingly, “Ugly”‘s chorus isn’t exactly melodious, but its verses/pre-choruses invert the “Epic” rhythmic-rapping-to-ringing-
Didja know? Dude, it looks like the place to party with King For A Day is Western Europe and the Southeastern Hemisphere, where the album camped out in the top ten for around three months (!) and six months (!!), respectively. Meanwhile in the U.S., King peaked at 31 during two months on the albums chart. Sarcastic slow clap, America
VIDEO | Super Rock Festival | Lisbon | July 9th 1995
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9. Digging The Grave.
MUSIC | GOULD, BORDIN, PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON
BILL GOULD | 1995
"Radio will say the our song 'Digging The Grave' is too hard for them, too metal. If we do a song like 'Evidence', then none of the metal stations will want it!"
"Radio will say the our song 'Digging The Grave' is too hard for them, too metal. If we do a song like 'Evidence', then none of the metal stations will want it!"
Full FNMFollowers review of the song HERE.
VIDEO | The Jon Stewart Show | September 1995.
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10. Take This Bottle.
MUSIC | GOULD
LYRICS | PATTON, GOULD
MIKE BORDIN | 1995
"He (Bill) was uncomfortable bringing it to the table and showing it to us because he thought we'd laugh at it. To me, it's refreshing to hear this band doing something like that."
"I really dig that one. It's a song where I sit back and play and I almost don't even play, it's almost like auto-pilot, and I listen to everybody else. It's very minimal. Kinda reminds me almost of Bob Dylan or something, kinda country, twangy, or something. I'm really excited that we're doing a song like that, and I bet it's gonna surprise a lot of people. Again, the singing is great. It's my wife's favourite song."
"I really dig that one. It's a song where I sit back and play and I almost don't even play, it's almost like auto-pilot, and I listen to everybody else. It's very minimal. Kinda reminds me almost of Bob Dylan or something, kinda country, twangy, or something. I'm really excited that we're doing a song like that, and I bet it's gonna surprise a lot of people. Again, the singing is great. It's my wife's favourite song."
MIKE PATTON | 1995
"It's like a Guns N' Roses song! Maybe Hank Williams lyrics, but definitely GN'R music."
BILL GOULD | 1995
"It allowed us to branch out a lot with the song writing. It wasn't so much seeking out weird directions to go in as it was just doing things we've always wanted to do - '70s stuff like 'Evidence,' or even country stuff, like 'Take This Bottle.' I wrote 'Take This Bottle' on a 4-track at my house; I didn't even think it would be appropriate for the band, but I played a demo for everybody and they liked it. I was kind of intimidated to volunteer it, but I'm glad I did, because I think it really adds to the record."
VIDEO | Download Festival | UK | June 12th 2009
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11. King For A Day.
MUSIC | GOULD, BOTTUM, BORDIN, PATTON SPRUANCE
LYRICS | PATTON
RODDY BOTTUM | 1995
"I like the textures of that song a lot. I think the textures are what's really gonna eventually make or break that song. The string sound was really nice, and just the breath of the acoustic guitars was really important. It sounds great, the strumming of that guitar. And the intro and the outro are my favourite parts - the simpler parts, going into the song, coming out of the song, I really like a lot. It gets really dense in the middle, which is a part of the whole journey of that song, but my favourite parts of the song are going into it and coming out of it. It's very Roxy Music to me, almost David Bowie, sorta like a surreal sort of traveling composition to me."
TREY SPRUANCE | 1995
TREY SPRUANCE | 1995
"I like the regal feel of it... Not so much regal - it does change its ambience, but - it sorta maintains a largeness to it, like a presence, like you're inside some sort of large chamber of some type, and without a bunch of reverb. It's not effects that are causing that, it's the mood of the music. I think it's very moody. It reminds me of a Peter Murphy solo album or something like that."
MIKE BORDIN | 1995
"We had that in Billy's house on his computer. We worked on that song for a long time, to keep the balance between the lightness and the loud parts. It took a lot of work; that was a difficult song to work on. Really glad the way it turned out. It kinda reminds me of early Roxy Music, which I was a really big fan of. I loved _Stranded_, _Siren_, _Country Life_, and all those albums. It's got that elegant, suave tone, but it's still like a rock song. The middle of that song is cool, too, because we waited 'til we were in the studio, and we wrote it in the studio, so it was kinda like a jam. Which is also really exciting, we didn't really do that very often."
VIDEO | Area 4 Festival | Germany | August 24th 2009
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12. What A Day.
MUSIC | PATTON, SPRUANCE
LYRICS | PATTON
FROM OLD FNM:
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson contains this phrase (in boldface): "Kill the body and the head will die" which also appears in FNM's song "What A Day".
VIDEO | The Word | UK | March 3rd 1995
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13. The Last To Know.
MUSIC | GOULD, PATTON, BORDIN
LYRICS | PATTON
The title if the song features on a banner on the wall in the conference room at the Da Nang base, it reads: "First to go last to know - We will defend to the death your right to be misinformed". Patton has stated he is a fan of the director Stanley Kubrick.
METAL SUCKS REVIEW | 2008
Written by Gould, Patton and Bordin with lyrics by Patton. By the second-last song on King For A Day, Faith No More has spazzed, gurgled, and burst veins to surpass the RDA; “Last” commences the two-track process of closure and departure so listeners might exhale after weathering King‘s pitched battle with sanity. It’s also FNM’s most bittersweet moment — topping “Underwater Love” and “A Small Victory” — and the band’s most baldly human, unblustery lyric, one that cements the sense that the personal is displacing the universal in FNM music. In close-up, “Last” is a relationship song, a magnanimous admission that its author is damaged goods, a patient and smiling farewell. I get waaay verklempt. Sniff.
Awesome song elevated to supra-awesomeness by the final act guitar solo passage (at 3:03). The FNM veterans hoist Spruance to their shoulders here, and the new guy responds with two fistfuls of roman candles and a sparkly Macho Man duster. Behold the sound of Earth’s greatest band.'
JAI KIM INTERVIEW | 1995.
JK: Okay, the song "The Last to Know."
RB (to Trey): Which one was that?
TS (to Roddy): "Dirge."
TS (to JK): Yeah, I have similar feelings on that one. I like the space that that song creates. Very large space.
RB: Very dense. Texture's very dense.
JK: Nice tempo. Not too fast.
TS: Yeah, it plods.
RB: Pearl Jam. [Everyone laughs.] Pearl Jam on mushrooms.
JK (to Trey): I love your guitar solo on that.
TS: Oh really? Jimi Hendrix, right? [More laughs.] Thanks, yeah, that was a fiveinthemorning one, for sure.
VIDEO | The Forum | March 13th, 1995
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14. Just A Man.
MUSIC | GOULD, BOTTUM
LYRICS | GOULD, SPRUANCE, PATTON
RODDY BOTTUM | 1995
"I don't think we actually had much distance on 'Just A Man', and it probably benefited the most. Queen? Oh god, a rock opera anthem! I think it's a little more obtuse than Queen, a little bit more like if you were in your 40s and gambling, sweating, a little overweight and in love, that's the way we saw it anyway."
BILL GOULD | 1995
"Pat (singer Mike Patton) put the old Anthony Newley on top of it, and it worked it worked perfect." - Bill 1994.
"We listen to a lot of Chinese classical music they use these really nice, major, big, sweeping chords. It's a nice sound, but it almost was a little bit pretentious because it was so big."
“There's also some stuff that sounds really tolerable because it's deliberately tacky. Like Just A Man, that's a tacky song. There are things there that when we were first doing them it felt like we were swallowing a big pill. Like, ‘Oh my God, who would do something like this?’ But that's the fun of it, too.”
MIKE BORDIN | 1995
"It's totally frightening. That song is like the spawn of some bizarre and perverse experiment. Some people, they don't get that. Some people do get that, and the people who do get it, really appreciate it"
TREY SPRUANCE | 2011
"I think my favourite part from that was when all of our recording was finished and we went to the studio to add string parts and a choir at the end of the last song. And the gospel choir, it was really wonderful watching them work.
It was also funny, as we showed up at the studio and nobody had realized that charts had to be written for the string players. So that job fell to me and I very quickly, off the top of my head just charted out what we thought the string parts should be, a really half-ass job and that ended up on the record, it was pretty funny."
TREY SPRUANCE | 2011
"I think my favourite part from that was when all of our recording was finished and we went to the studio to add string parts and a choir at the end of the last song. And the gospel choir, it was really wonderful watching them work.
It was also funny, as we showed up at the studio and nobody had realized that charts had to be written for the string players. So that job fell to me and I very quickly, off the top of my head just charted out what we thought the string parts should be, a really half-ass job and that ended up on the record, it was pretty funny."
VIDEO | SWU Festival | Brazil | November 14th 2011
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15. Absolute Zero.
MUSIC | PATTON
LYRICS | PATTON
VIDEO | Maquinaria Festival | Chile | November 12th 2011
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The B-Sides.
BILL GOULD | 1995
"The b-sides that we did were three cover songs that were actually recorded at my house. There's "The Joke" by the Bee Gees, there's a song by a band called The Brothers Four called "Greenfields", and "Spanish Eyes" by Al Martino! They all sound really good, I'm really into it! We were in this bar in Gwaum, god, it was so twisted! You see, Gwaum is like a rock in the middle of the ocean; they have like two million snakes per mile -- they have so many snakes that they have killed all the birds, they have no more birds in all of Gwaum. So, we're sitting in this bar and they have posters of hard-core porn videos all over the wall. It was a regular bar, and they had animal porn on the wall! And we're like, 'What the hell is this?!', and in the corner of the room they had this karaoke machine and they were all singing the words "I started a joke ..." and there was this bouncing ball so they could follow the words. The lyrics were so pathetic and depressing that we just said 'We have to do this song!' It's the most miserable song I ever heard in my life!' "
1. I Started A Joke
MUSIC / LYRICS | BARRY, ROBIN, MAURICE GIBB
MUSIC / LYRICS | BARRY, ROBIN, MAURICE GIBB
VIDEO | Directed by Vito Rocco
2. Spanish Eyes.
MUSIC | BERT KAEMPFERT
LYRICS | EDDIE SNYDER
3. Greenfields.
MUSIC / LYRICS | THE BROTHERS FOUR
4. I Wanna Fuck Myself.MUSIC / LYRICS | GG ALLIN
!!!
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