Joe Exotic's songwriter gets publishing deal, continues to write songs about Carole Baskin

Once upon a time, in those halcyon days when crippling anxiety over COVID-19 and economic collapse felt fresh and new, a quarantined nation bonded over its mutual love of Tiger King, a Netflix docuseries about big cats, Trumpian hubris, and a lady who may or may not have fed her first husband to tigers. While the series no doubt spurred some to take up big cat activism, it mostly served as a means for people to chuckle at Joe Exotic, whose “original” music and their accompanying videos went viral in the subsequent weeks.

A shocked nation gasped, then, when it was revealed that Joe Exotic hadn’t written the songs, nor was that actually him singing them. Credit Vince Johnson and Danny Clinton of the Clinton Johnson Band for the transcendently goofy tunes, and congratulate Johnson, who just scored a new publishing deal with BMG and a distribution deal with Create Music Group. Clinton, sadly, passed away last year.

Johnson will release all of the songs he penned for Joe Exotic as part of the deal, per TMZ, and will drop a few new cuts proving that, despite his former employer being behind bars, he’s still very much in the Joe Exotic business. Yep, his first single with The Vince Johnson Band is, like the morbid “Kitty Kitty,” about how Carole Baskin might be a stone cold murderer.