Danko Jones – Born A Lion

Danko Jones writes songs about:

1. fucking
2. rocking
3. kicking ass

Note that “kicking ass” can mean fighting or it can just mean being awesome. That is the extent of the artistic exploration that I want from Danko Jones. I turn to Danko for a very specific product and that is how it should be forevermore.

My cohorts were talking about how great Born A Lion is. I wasn’t about to disagree, but the nature of my Danko appreciation means that I don’t really think of him as having albums. He has songs. They are generally great. They get bundled together for sale. That’s nice, but I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and listened to a Danko album from start to finish – I just cherrypick whichever songs I’m in the mood for at any given time. How I can be in the mood for a specific song when I just said they’re essentially all the same remains a mystery, but it happens.

I was going to go song-by-song through the whole album but I hit too many songs like Sound of Love where I thought “Yep, this rules. What else do you want me to say about it?” So let’s hit the highlights.

Note: there aren’t exactly a lot of songs about rocking or kicking ass on here.

The album opens with a killer one-two punch of Play the Blues and Lovercall. A few, well, bluesy notes at the start of Blues lulls the unsuspecting listener into a false sense of security before Danko turns it up and basically rips your head off. Fantastic opener. And Lovercall is two minutes and fifty-three seconds of Danko championing cunnilingus. This is the quintessential Danko song. A million billion stars.

I’ve never given Word is Bond its due. This makes me sad. This song is great. I should have realized its greatness a long time ago. A sizable chunk of this song is devoted to Danko letting us know that when a particular babe shakes her booty, it gets him so hot. I am fine with this for the specific reason that it is Danko Jones.

Danko sings the praises of Caramel City and immediately follows it up with Get Outta Town. Maybe there is some message here. A treatise on appearances and how they can deceive; the masks we wear to tell the world that everything is fine – better than fine, WONDERFUL, even – but secretly, things aren’t fine, your dad’s a dick and all the girls in town have boyfriends and you’d love to run away from it all, steal a car and run off to a new city and a new life where you can be the rocking, fucking, ass-kicking guy that you always knew you could be, if not for everything that’s holding you back. Or else maybe they determined the track order by pulling song titles out of a hat. Who knows?

Suicide Woman and Love is Unkind harken back to the album-opening theme of Play the Blues; namely, women will destroy your life. I’m not sure I agree but I tend to think that Danko and I have different types. And I don’t want to hear any of your nonsense about how real-life Danko is reserved and nice and nothing like his stage persona. I refuse to believe it. Danko Jones is sex in human form, wearing leather pants, a being who knows exactly how to please a woman yet somehow is perpetually done wrong by them, and yet he is unable to stop pushing that boulder up the metaphorical hill until, oh no, it rolls to the bottom again, so he chases it back down, writes a song about it, and starts pushing it back up again. Those last five words may or may not be literal.

Someday he will release an album of adult alternative soft rock and I will be so upset with him.