American Images
Mermaid Kiss explain their concept behind their current work-in-progress album American Images. Yes, they’re a prog band - an album’s got to have a concept.
Although I have never been to America, I have a good idea of what it’s like. In my head are cities, deserts, buttes, mountains, canyons, houses, cars, people, lakes, rivers, lots of empty space. And roads. Especially roads.
Evelyn’s never to been to America either. I harbor a desire to sling a couple of guitars in the back of a beat up Buick (it wouldn’t have to be a Buick, anything distinctly American would do) and play our way across the USA, taking our time, stopping off whenever and wherever we feel - staying as much as possible on the back roads where we believe the real heartland of America lies.
This fantasy, is, of course, fueled by watching far too many US road movies with evocative soundtracks… As we planned our imaginary journey from picturesque Boston to the bright lights of New York, down via the Appalachian Mountains where time stands still, and on to the steamy South (ours is to be no straight ‘coast to coast’ trip), it dawned on us that the America we were driving through is the America of films and of music - an America uncorrupted by reality.
They’ll be telling me they’ve never actually been to Etalis next.
I’ve only been to America on business trips to Atlanta, GA, back in the days before George Bush and the War on Terror. I have no desire to go there now. To me, America resembles a gigantic version of Milton Keynes. Not quite sure if that’s quite what Mermaid Kiss are after.
On the other hand, what about the HO-scale Americas built by various Americanophile railway modellers in Britain? I’m thinking of things like the small crumbling small prairie town of Godinez, Iowa, featured in the July issue of Continental Modeller. Or all those grain elevators (every layout seems to have one).
