The lead track off Mike Doughty’s new album Golden Delicious is called “Fort Hood.” It’s not an anti-war song, but it is about the young soldiers who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and about Doughty’s feelings about them. Doughty grew up a military brat and had first-hand experience with Vietnam veterans.
I smell blood and there’s no blood around
The blanked out eyes and the blanked out sound
I see them coming back; they’re motionless in an airport loungeLet the sunshine in
Let the sunshine in
The sunshine inYou should be getting stoned with a prom dress girl
You should still believe in an endless world
You should blast Young Jeezy with your friends in a parking lot
He wrote about the origins of the song on his blog and further explained that “Fort Hood is the base in Texas that’s lost the most people in Iraq and Afghanistan.” He also appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered back in October and spoke in more detail about his visit to Walter Reed Hospital, his father’s 40+ years in the military, his childhood on an Army post.
His mother talked his father in going together to see the movie Hair (1979). More recently, Doughty came across a recording of the 1971 Japanese cast recording of the musical and the chorus of “Let the Sunshine In” hit him rather emotionally. He ended up borrowing the chorus for “Fort Hood.” (You can find that cast album on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.)
Anyway, the song’s important enough to Doughty that he and director Bex Schwartz made a video on their own. It’s a seemingly happy, peppy video about a very unhappy subject.
Tags: Mike Doughty, Fort Hood, war, Iraq, Afghanistan