Blog Erik Brandt's ambiguous ode to Madison

Twin Cities singer and songwriter Erik Brandt was all the way over in Budapest, Hungary, in 2008, when for some reason he decided to write a song about Madison. While working as a teacher for the Fulbright Teacher Exchange program, he also recorded an album, Sometimes, with a backing band of Hungarian musicians, which explains the smart Eastern European flavor mixed in with Brandt's unassuming country sound. Track seven, "Madison," is pretty vague: "I've been circling around the heat of your flame / I try to get closer, but I get burned all the same." My first reaction was, well, shit, people better come out in decent numbers to see him open for Gene Ween Sunday at the High Noon Saloon, lest he develop a vendetta against uppity capital cities.

What is it with this vague, pleasant stalker-love-note of a song? "For no reason I can fully understand, I was regularly haunted by visions of Madison," Brandt says in an e-mail. "Sometimes they'd be of driving down Washington Avenue, or of eating a turtle sundae at Michael's Frozen Custard, or looking for discs at B-Side on State Street. It was as if Madison was 'calling' me in some vague way. So around April I'd had enough of it and decided to channel these cryptic mental images into a song. I was feeling the blues at the time, so that's how the tune turned out."

Well, as long as he's not pissed at our town. Still, I had to press him about the "get burned" part. "Not any getting 'burned' experiences really," he wrote back, "except that years ago we were supposed to play O'Cayz Corral on the first night of a tour but it burned down the week before!" So if you're ever having recurring daydreams about this city from across an ocean and can't figure out why, and don't particularly have a problem with Madison and think it's rather nice, this tune's for you:

Madison - Erik Brandt