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You know how you'll just stumble across a story that's been going on for years, and you somehow completely missed it all? That's what's going on here. I just saw this Metafilter post about Daniel C, an outsider artist who recorded a CD of songs called The Pirate of Love. Somehow the CD made it all the way to Iceland, where it inspired an animator to create a short film about the music. I'm reminded of a period during the 2000s, when it seemed like a new film inspired by an outsider artist showed up every other week. There was the Wild Man Fischer doc, the Richard Peterson doc, the Daniel Johnston doc, the Jandek doc....

Anyway, check out the music and the film that it inspired. It's your feel-good Bad Music story of the day!

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Over the past week I've put together a couple of videos that you might find interesting. The first is over at the Fake Criswell Tumblr, and is a quick edit I made of Criswell's performance in Plan 9. The other video is at YouTube and is a recreated version of a piece that Negativland put together for their live shows in the 1980s. Enjoy!

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I'm sure you're familiar with the song that tries to capture some of the fame of a celebrity by name-checking that person in the song. Example: "Ringo, I Love You" by the obscure and never-heard-from-again singer Bonnie Jo Mason. Another example: "Just Like Eddie" by Heinz. Usually the song is sung by a person who is much less famous thant the celebrity they're name-checking.

Not so in this week's Bad Music sample, a plea for Willie Nelson to sing a song with George Burns. You'd think that after being in show biz for 50 years at that point, George could have called up Willie and asked him to do a duet on his album George Burns in Nashville. Or maybe he just wanted to pretend he was just a plain old fellow who couldn't get hold of Willie any other way, and cut a single to embarrass Willie in public. Either way, George's song-speaking ("You and your guitar ... me and my cigar") come off as the novelty song that the whole album was. (Exactly how many country albums did George Burns cut in his career?)

To the best of my knowledge Willie Nelson and George Burns never cut a duet. But at least it wasn't George's fault that it never happened! Willie still has some time in his life to cut a response song to explain his side of the story....

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