J Shogren: God’s 9:05
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Our new theme may be deliberately ambiguous, but it gives me the perfect excuse to share a favorite train song. We have a rule here at Star Maker Machine that a song must be at least five years old. It must have stood the test of time, and shown staying power. So I could not share this one last time we looked at trains, because it was too new at the time. That is no longer the case, so here it is. J Shogren has one of the most wonderfully sly senses of humor of any songwriter I know. Here, he imagines that we all board a train to the afterlife when we die. We hand in our tickets, most of us, and the train is either an elevated train or a subway, with us having no choice in the matter, usually. But Shogren imagines such a train being boarded by two characters from legend, John Henry and Casey Jones. Such men would never be content to simply wait and see where such an important train would take them. Their training, you might say, would give them more options than that. So it’s a stretch, I admit, but there is another way the song could be said to fit our new theme.
J Shogren is an artist I discovered for my old music blog, Oliver di Place, and I am happy to say he has become a friend since. He has one of the most extraordinary bios of anyone, musician or not, that I know of, and I encourage you all to seek out that information. You may ask when you see it if it is just an elaborate tall tale, but I researched it, and it is all true. I will leave the details for you to discover, in hopes that you will also find more of his music.
