Somehow when I posted other Mike Patton songs I didn't figure I could work in a Tomahawk song, so thankfully we've come back around to something hard-rock like after a good month of straight weird indie shit. You might remember Mike Patton from Day 98 and Day 99. If you don't, well, there you go.

So as per my usual routine I was looking at the SongMeanings page for this song to try to figure out if there was something I could write about it. On there someone makes some snide comment to the people discussing how it's obviously about killing off a relationship to the effect of, "Never watched the show Captain Midnight, have you?" to which no one responds.

I thought, fine, I'll take the bait. Turns out there's a few things related to the name Captain Midnight.

1.) There was a radio serial called Captain Midnight that ran from 1938 to 1949 involving a aviator who helped people out and fought crime. Apparently it was hugely popular with an audience in the millions. Arguably there's no way Mike Patton listened to this since he was born in 1968.

2.) In Robert A. Heinlein's book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, one of the main character's aliases is Captain Midnight. Unfortunately the song and this book share nothing in common.

3.) A 1979 movie called On the Air with Captain Midnight about a teenager who uses a powerful CB radio to take over the airwaves as a renegade disc jockey probably doesn't have much to do with this song either.

4.) In 1986, John R. MacDougall temporarily blocked the HBO satellite signal (simply by sending a more powerful signal at it) in a protest against HBO scrambling their signal and forcing people to pay for de-scramblers or something. I don't know, but a lot of shit went down, and none of it has to do with this song.

And then I remembered what I've always known about Patton: none of his songs mean anything. This one has meaning just by coincidence, probably, he decided the emotionality of the music warranted really dramatic lyrics so he made his words go that way. From the Wikipedia entry on Mike Patton:

"I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning."

Ah, well, at least this all filled some space.

P.S. This album is off the hook and totally awesome.