Bash Street Worlds
Music by ANDREW SHAPIRO
Lyrics by NEIL GAIMAN
I can remember when I dreamed of distant places
Everything was dandy and so desperate
Schools were things that ran like clockwork
I was given Bash Street worlds
Everything was dandy and was
So good so good good
There's a space in my heart as I look around now
A space in my heart as I look around
All the people all the places
All the dreams and all the faces
Everything was drawn and lettered
Easy justice never bettered
Everything was dandy was
So good so good good
Everything was dandy
I was given Bash Street worlds
I'll never be that age again
I'll never be the same
Nothing needed to make sense
Just to be consistently inventive and invented
And each panel opened up into impossible philosophy
Pink Jean Mint Green (2016), is a proper synthpop album in the classic mold of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark fused with the more contemporary electronic sounds of Air and Daft Punk. Produced by Grammy-winner Mario McNulty (of David Bowie fame), the album also features drummer Sterling Campbell, another Bowie alumnus who also played with Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper. A lovely plaintiveness is found, particularly in the opening track, Lauren Hynde, which tells the story of Shapiro’s imagined relationship with a character in novels by Bret Easton Ellis. The final track Bash Street Worlds, co-written with English fantasy author Neil Gaiman, is a real belter. Beginning like OMD’s classic 1980 song Enola Gay, the song floats along before ending with a surprising coda– a clarinet trio written in homage to the one Philip Glass wrote for the end of Paul Simon’s song The Late Great Johnny Ace.
—Mark Prendergast, author, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance
Shapiro says, “a few years ago I met Neil and his wife, Amanda [Palmer], through a mutual friend at a dinner after a Philip Glass concert in Edinburgh. And after that we started writing back and forth and he was very complimentary about my music, saying it was music he ‘could imagine writing to’. So I was inspired to ask him if he ever wrote lyrics and told him about an idea I had for a song. When I was little, my nanny was Scottish and through her I read these two British comics called The Beano and The Dandy. They were a joy to read — the British lingo and food and clothes and the sports the characters played and all that. It was unusual for an American kid to get their hands on them. Neil liked the idea of a kid who lives imaginatively inside of this sort of alien comic universe. The title comes from one of the comic strips called ‘Bash Street Kids’, which is about a gang of kids who wreak some serious mayhem.”
—PopMatters
"BASH STREET WORLDS" (from the ANDREW SHAPIRO album PINK JEAN MINT GREEN) Release June 24th, 2016.
Publicity by Sacks & Co.
(P) & © 2016 by Airbox Music Publishing LLP (ASCAP), Brooklyn, NY.
Lyrics © 2016 by Neil Gaiman, published by The Blank Corporation (ASCAP).
Artwork by Glen Baldridge, from the original 2016 album release “Pink Jean Mint Green”
All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.