MOON GOING DOWN
The album I have by Thomas Anderson, Moon Going Down was released on Marilyn Records; the label predates Patrick Boissel’s better known, Bomp! Records-affiliated Alive Records. The promotional material for the album (which is still available on the Bomp! Records website) quotes Anderson as saying: “When I started doing this, I wanted to establish up front that my allegiance was with rock ’n’ roll and not singer/songwriters. God love ’em, but a lot of them are telling the same stories about dusty roads, country back porches, and missing you. Here I am singing about Martians. That’s my thing. There are other stories to tell, and I want to be the one to tell them.”
One of the best songs on Moon Going Down – it was selected as a “Choice Cut” by Village Voice rock scribe Robert Christgau – is “Jerry’s Kids”.
As to other songs on Moon, in “Death’s Door”, Anderson duels with “Mr. Death” in a fever dream; and he tells a twisted tale of a prior girlfriend in “Running with Heidi” accompanied by a pounding beat. The final cut on the album – the lyrics are also printed for this song – is called “Are You Sure John Donne it this Way”; only Thomas Anderson could mix a reference to an old “outlaw country” song by Waylon Jennings, “Are You Sure Hank Done it this Way” with John Donne, the British poet and satirist who was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.
(November 2012)
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Thomas Anderson is one of those guys where I only have one album and wish I had more; I guess I am going to have to break down and order one. Moon Going Down is the only one of their albums that I have ever seen on the Bomp! Mailorder website, where I do most of my mailordering.
(November 2014)
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I also recently picked up Thomas Anderson’s The Moon in Transit, another amazing album. Only heard that one once so far. The name is similar to that of the first album of his that I got, the Marilyn Records album Moon Going Down. When I put up the “Flashback” on Thomas Anderson five years ago, I could not find any songs at all on YouTube; I had to settle for listing lyrics instead. There are lots of his songs on YouTube now. Also, Thomas Anderson is one of the few UARB’s and UARA’s that has a Wikipedia article currently. (Another time, I ordered two more albums by a Thomas Anderson, not knowing whether it was the right guy or not. One of them, Is This Love? turned out to be a different Thomas Anderson, and I assumed that was true of the other CD as well. However, I discovered last month that the other one, Heaven is another great record by the right Thomas Anderson, so that’s four albums of his that I have now!)
(Year 10 Review)
