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World's Smallest Violin

from When We Were Animals by Mishka Shubaly

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about

Wait, I can explain…

This song took exactly eleven years and fifteen minutes to write. I wrote the chorus for this song in 2005. It sat for eleven years before I could write verses. Then in 2016, I stole the first line from Stanhope, something he tossed out during a podcast, and finished the rest of the song in fifteen minutes. It’s a power-ballad dedicated to male frailty and “Cheater’s Heaven” by Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, “a love song for monsters” as Kristine Levine put it.

When I first played this for my friend Charlie Kennedy, he giggled but described it as “horribly misogynistic.” I don’t think that’s true: I think it’s misanthropic. Sure, the woman doesn’t look great, but the man looks fucking depraved. Mostly, it’s about two shitty, desperate people being shitty and desperate together. Their combined loneliness and instability is greater than the sum of its parts, and it spins into a sad little tornado of cheap coke and well liquor and bad sex… and a catchy, sing-a-long chorus. Yeah, I thought I had a pretty low view of humanity until I played this song in Memphis and—even before the record had come out—the crowd was un-ironically belting out the choruses with me. You guys are broken, soulless degenerates. Never change.

lyrics

We were in a bar, I can’t remember the details
I passed for conscious, you passed for female
Parliaments and dick jokes and lukewarm Budweiser
Lime, ice, and tonic mixed with hand sanitizer

You were Xanax and Adderall, keybumps and Klonopin
Borderline personality disorder in bobby pins
When I kissed your mouth, you tasted like something
I hadn’t thrown up yet
And when I pulled down my pants, that look on your face,
Like you had lost a bet

I’m a trainwreck, you’re a graveyard
I’m a hard-on, only half-hard
Waving my dick in my hand
like a tiny white flag, no bigger than a pin
The World’s Smallest Violin

Threw my canary down your coal mine, what a fruitless endeavor
Like a flooded basement, the pumping went on forever
Morning came before we did
And shone cruel light on our failed fornication
So we fell into the only thing that we hadn’t tried:
the fetal position

(chorus)

Darling, tell me your name again
I swear, we’ll part the best of friends
At least until the tests come back negative
Then we’ll both agree to never speak of this again

(chorus)

Lesbians and virgins,
thanks for fucking nothing

credits

from When We Were Animals, released May 1, 2018

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Mishka Shubaly image

Mishka Shubaly Phoenix, Arizona

Shipwreck survivor, Jeopardy clue, bestselling writer, road dog on house arrest.

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