Yesterday Ottawa Showbox tweeted some love to pals The Acorn and their great record Pink Ghosts.
Tweet from January 22, 2014. It was cold that day in Ottawa.
It reminded me of the awesome cover The Acorn did of Guilt Trip Fashion, one of my very early solo songs I wrote to support my burgeoning solo act ‘The Glen Nevous Retraction’. The cover originally appeared on the Kelp 12 comp, but later was included for the reissue of Pink Ghosts.
Guilt Trip was penned in the late 90s and actually appeared on my first solo DIY record, ‘You Clean Up Pretty Good’. It was a staple of my early solo shows and I thought was the flagship song for what I was trying to do at the time.
It was conceived in the style of classic Billy Bragg: simple, stripped down, frantic and electric guitar driven. It’s a song about lost love and one of the lyrics is “Guilt trip fashion at 93 Mhz of truth”, a reference to CKCU a great university station in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
I probably played Guilt Trip Fashion at this show with Andrew Vincent in Kitchener, Ontario around the year 2000.
The club was the ‘Circus Room’ and they had a POOL upstairs.
When it came time to prep my first studio album, I knew I had to re-record it and the version that appeared on ‘Sell Out Slow’ is the better known of the two:
When Kelp Records put out the call in 2006 for its community to cover each other’s songs for an anniversary compilation, The Acorn chose Guilt Trip. I still remember the first time I heard it, feeling completely captivated by the magical acoustic orchestration and beautiful singing that Rolf and co. have always been known for.
Check it and download for free here: