October 14 - Song For Black Sabbath's Second North American Tour

These are late because ironically I was up in Manchester to see Mountain Goats. More about that when we get there.

This is a small live guitar-only song, which is suitable for a meditation on fame. Small and simple and true to its subject. Ozzy Osbourne was a very unlikely person to become famous. He was apparently a wreck as a young person, a product of trauma and abuse who left school at 15 and worked in a slaughterhouse until the band took off.

I always feel like people are just waiting for famous people who come from circumstances like that to fall apart. Fame is tough, sudden fame is tougher, and the shock to the system of suddenly having a large but not infinite amount of money is something that often destroys people who are not given proper preparation for it. And by proper preparation I'm very much meaning the kind that the middle class and the wealthy give their children that the poor never have occasion to. Pretty much any time I hear a story about a "wild child" destructive celebrity, I find myself asking what their management had done to prepare them for what celebrity would actually feel like. Because sometimes it feels like being able to compartmentalise your life and provide for yourself, sometimes it feels like being handed the keys to the world's fastest car and being told to aim it at the swimming pool of your choice.