the first round
(2) kenny loggins, “footloose”
smacked down
(15) clarence carter, “patches”
267-218
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, watch the videos (if available), listen to the songs, feel free to argue, tweet at us, and consider. Then vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on March 2.

beth nguyen On “Footloose,” Kenny Loggins’s Best-Worst Song

I’ve been listening to Kenny Loggins for more than thirty years now. Not on purpose. But have you tried to get away from him? You can’t. He’s lurking in the grocery store; he’s waiting for you to get settled in the dentist’s chair. If you don’t find him, he will find you. Kenny Loggins is like someone I run into at conferences, a perpetual acquaintance. There is an accumulation. If I turn on the radio in the car and hear his voice, I keep listening. Old buddy, old friend. We are getting through this life together.
Most often, he is singing “Footloose.” This is not Kenny Loggins’s worst song. (That honor might belong to “Danger Zone.”) “Footloose” is Kenny Loggins’s best-worst song, an Oscar-nominated song, which he wrote for the screenplay that became “Footloose.” The song is deep 1984 even while it’s trying to summon an earlier decade; it’s a white guy shouting let’s rock n roll. It’s a song that sounds loud even when the volume is low, that makes you feel pretty good and pretty ridiculous at the same time. And like so many of my favorite bad songs, it begins with a story: 

Been working so hard / I’m punching my card
Eight hours, for what? / Oh tell me what I got.

Then we turn:

I’ve got this feeling / That time’s just holding me down.
I’ll hit the ceiling / Or else I’ll tear up this town

I knew the “Footloose” song by heart years before I ever saw the movie, but I cannot separate them. I hear Kenny Loggins but I picture Kevin Bacon going wild in an abandoned warehouse. Kevin Bacon on the movie poster, dancing alone, eyes closed, mouth opening, his body turned away because he doesn’t even need us, because the music from his Walkman is taking him where he needs to go. He’s an old-looking high schooler named Ren, a Chicago kid who finds himself in a rural Utah town where dancing seems so sinful that it must be banned.
The Midwestern town I grew up in wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that but it was conservative and Christian enough for me to feel quick tenderness for Kevin Bacon, for Ren. I liked the way he took on the bullies, the way he taught a new friend how to dance. I liked his little Volkswagen Beetle and his skinny, reckless, disciplined body.

You’re playing so cool, obeying every rule
Deep way down in your heart, you’re burning, yearning for some—
Somebody to tell you
That life ain’t passing you by

The “Footloose” song plays the opening and the closing of the movie, the former an extended close-up of various dancing feet, the latter an extended scene in a gussied-up barn where a bunch of high school kids who have been forbidden from dancing suddenly know how to dance. It is embarrassing and hilarious and exhilarating to watch this scene, just as it is to listen to the “Footloose” song in the company of anyone else. Here are some of the whitest people ever trying to breakdance. The guys are in tuxedos—there’s a lot of pale blue, some ruffles, even plaid. Ren stands out in a maroon jacket. The girls are in ethereal fabrics and pastels. Everyone dances in a shower of glitter. At the end, we get the perspective of the balloons on the floor: we are the balloons and Kevin Bacon dances toward us. Everybody cut, everybody cut, sings Kenny Loggins. It’s a demand but also a statement: everybody. cut. footloose.
It’s been 36 years since “Footloose” entered the American consciousness. Kenny Loggins is 72 now, a purveyor of yacht rock. Kevin Bacon is 61 and pretty much everywhere. Ren would be about 54 years old. I think I’ve seen him. He’s out there running at dawn. He’s got all this gear in his garage. He looks good for his age in the way that men sometimes get to, easily. He hides his life crises with salads and biking and craft beers. He’s never really quit cigarettes. It is possible he’s an asshole, the kind of guy who talks about working hard and playing hard. Or maybe he is a secret, at once open and closed. Alone, he still wants it: the dance, the girl, the escape, the life people said he couldn’t have. He has long since kicked off those Sunday shoes.
The best bad songs thrill and shame at the same time. They win you over with their exaltations. Soon, you’re singing out loud while driving. You’re dancing in your house. Maybe some karaoke? You get to have this, for just a little while, before returning to the land of self-conscious self-regard. “Footloose” is a glorious song because it wants us not to care. This is where nostalgia and critique meet up and decide if they’re going to become anxiety or joy. This is me feeling fuck everything and I’m so dumb at the same time, listening to “Footloose.”
A good bad song isn’t a guilty pleasure; it’s a pleasure because of the guilt. It’s procrastination. It’s that feeling when you know something is a little bit wrong but you do it anyway, because the moment now feels better than the future reckoning. If Kenny Loggins has made a career of this, he has won. I have known his voice for more years of my life than not. All those car rides, all those radio stations, all those minutes waiting in some place where someone else’s music has got me fixed, pinned down. We are all of us trying to get through, trying to be and to change, but those old songs are staying the same. That’s what they’re meant to do. Out of nowhere Kenny Loggins will grab our hands: remember me? Come here. Take me back. Please, Louise. Pull me off of my knees. And we do, because we know exactly what to expect and how good it feels—this is how good it can be—those two or three minutes when we can pretend to be somewhere or someone else, there beyond the outskirts of town.

Beth Nguyen once got a speeding ticket because she was listening to “Footloose.” She confesses that her favorite song from that movie soundtrack is Deniece Williams’s “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” She also writes books and teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

ashley strosnider on “patches”

I’m in Denver for a long weekend to visit my brother and his girlfriend in the new house they just bought, and we’re tired from a morning disaster in which nearly everything that could’ve gone wrong did—I almost killed his cat with an electric recliner we had to disassemble to retrieve her, all the while hoping all the blood on her mouth was only from having bitten Sara’s finger half off and not from crushed internal organs, and Sara had to get a tetanus shot after bleeding all over their new rug, and the other two cats had to take tranquilizers to offset an inexplicable stress-induced feud—and affliction hangs heavy, and I’m thinking about “Patches,” the most sad-sack snowball song I know, humming it to myself in a moody loop. Sara’s cooking dinner, and my brother’s single-mindedly sharpening a knife, broody and casually menacing, when I take the opening to ask him what he remembers about the song. He groans.
“Look,” I tell him, “I’m not trying to dredge up all your deep, dark childhood feelings. Just the ones attached to that song.”
“I remember the recording.”
“The Clarence Carter one?”
“Are we not talking about the song Dad made up?”
I clarified for my brother some points I should clarify here, too. My dad did not write the song “Patches.” General Johnson and Ronnie Dunbar did, and it won them the 1971 Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues song. My dad did, however, record the song, on a Yak Bak 2 my brother got for Christmas sometime in the mid-90s—complete with the pitch dial to speed up or slow down recordings—twenty-some years after the song’s 1970 zenith, when it hit #4 on Billboard’s Hot 100, #2 in R&B, and #2 on the UK singles chart. General Johnson recorded the song first, then Carter recorded it at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals with hit producer Rick Hall. The Rudies did a bafflingly upbeat and jaunty reggae version. Good Ontario Boy Ray Griff of Toronto, with a put-on Johnny-Cash-esque accent, took it to #26 on the US country music charts that same year. Alabama later recorded it, then Jerry Reed recorded it, and the Brazilian band Titãs did a version called “Marvin (Patches)” that stays true to the story and the melody and which, frankly, slaps. Dickey Lee recorded a totally different song called “Patches,” which is no less of a bummer. And a full twenty-four years after Carter’s 1970 hit, George Jones and B.B. King released another version in 1994—the same year the Yak Bak went on the market. Coincidence? Probably.
You don’t need to be familiar with any of these recordings to understand that my dad’s version, sped way up Chipmunk-style, was the best version, perhaps the only true version. Believe me when I say that a song this heavy with sentiment and borrowed nostalgia and faux grief, a song this treacly, this committed to cliché, this banal and repetitive, is best served pitched high into a warp-speed fast-forward. Let the end be swift and painless.
Patches must have prayed that same thing when his papa called him to his dyin’ bed, with tears in his eyes, just before he put the weight of the world on his young son’s shoulders, saying “Patches, I’m depending on you, son, to pull the family through. My son, it’s all left up to you.”
These dying words haunt the rest of Patches’s life, and they certainly haunt the song, which relies heavily on its chorus to give the false impression that this is a catchy song, an affecting song, a song that even pretends to make good use of Carter’s bluesy baritone. We don’t know why or how Patches’s dad died. Whether he smoked for years and died of lung cancer, whether he got his leg stuck in the plow and bled out or died of an infection, whether he starved himself to death or worked himself to death or drank himself to death. We only know that he asked his kid, who only turns thirteen later in the song, to take care of the whole family. Children of dysfunctional family units often feel pressured to do this anyway—to care for others, to cover up for others, to pick up slack, to take the weight of the world upon their shoulders and keep the whole family together, to keep anyone on the outside from noticing the patches. Did his father even really have to ask?

“You’re telling me that’s a real song?” My brother does not set down the knife, but he does stop grinding it. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Sara’s washing the steak-blood off her hands, which is fully too much blood for one day, and grabbing her phone to cue it up. My brother cringes reflexively as the drumbeat and the spoken intro kick in:

I was born and raised down in Alabama
on a farm way back up in the woods.
I was so ragged folks used to call me Patches.
Papa used to tease me about it—'course deep down inside
he was hurt 'cause he'd done all he could.

Hint: If your brother grows up genuinely believing that a song that became a 1970 radio hit was written on the fly by your father sometime circa 1994, unless your father is a noted songwriter or at least someone who can carry a tune or perhaps play an instrument, it is probably not, in fact, a very good song.
My dad can carry a tune. His problem is that he can never remember the melody. He’s never flat or in the wrong key, he’s just making it up as he goes, which may partially explain his affinity for “Patches,” a song that is nearly as spoken as it is sung. These spoken verses hardly showcase Carter’s explosive baritone, his real range and the vocal talent that’s so apparent elsewhere on the album, in songs like his soulful rendering of the Beatles’s “Let it Be” and the excellent “Getting the Bills (But No Merchandise).” Clarence Carter’s voice is why anyone would buy a Clarence Carter record. But anyone, my melody-challenged dad included, could readily sing along with “Patches,” or talk it, and it would sound about right. After dinner, just to crack us up or annoy us. In the hallway, when he was having a good day. With a beer in hand, somewhere in the garage or the yard on a sunny day or a cold evening. In our bedrooms, when he was poking his head in to make sure we were doing our homework, reminding my brother and I that he’d done his best, and it was up to us to do the rest.
I should clarify that this is not that essay. My father was not dying—or, he was not dying in a way that is obvious to me except in retrospect, and anyway, he changed course in time, and then he did not die after all. I should clarify, too, that my dad does not think “Patches” is a bad song. In fact, if you ask him out of the blue what his favorite song is, he’ll say “Patches.”
I tried it, over the summer. It was June or July or August, and we were floating, stone sober, in a lake. “Hey, Dad, what’s your favorite song?”
“You know.”
“Say it.”
He sang it. “Patches, I’m depending on you, son.”
So I asked him why.
“What do you mean why?”
“I mean why is that your favorite song?”
“It’s a good song. And I had a dog named Patches.”
Patches, Princess, Duke I, and Duke II—always beagles, though he never had one again after he left home. He thinks they’re cute but stupid, and he hates the absurd sound of their howl. A beagle’s howl is not exactly funny, not when it is scared, when it’s hunting, when it’s hungry or hurt, but there’s something silly if not quite laughable about the way it alerts you there is cause for alarm.
Carter’s recording is a little like that. The persona he embodies in this song—and make no mistake, this is all persona—is scared and sad, and he’s trying his best but the whole world is against him, and yet he persists. He’s after something, and if you’re not careful—and who’s careful when listening to radio hits?—the intended emotion might get you. It’s meant to. The track is heavily produced, the lyrics are about as blunt in begging for sympathy as they could possibly be, and Carter knows how to work his voice to maximum effect, at least when the chorus gives him the opportunity. This is savvy production at its finest, and whether you buy in or see right through it says more about you than it says about whether or not this song is really any good.
 “Patches” does not so much tell a sad story as it does gesture toward one. Its appeal (if it can be called appeal) is rooted in its universality, not its specificity. Spoiler alert: there’s no catharsis. We don’t learn anything about how Patches’s life turns out in the end. If his brothers and sisters starve to death or move up and on, if he ever gets a decent job or a high-school diploma. If they ever have enough to eat. If he ever gets new pants. This is not a triumphant story, really, but it asks us to feel for Patches not because of any eventual hard-earned victory but because we prize his hard work and perseverance.
Roland Barthes writes, “Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the ‘unreal,’ exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation” (A Lover’s Discourse). That’s exactly how this song functions: it gets worse and worse and worse, like some guys sat around the songwriting table wondering what else could go wrong for Patches, just for sport, and finally it transcends the struggle into this place of affirmation, and most insidious of all, that’s ultimately what the song asks us to love about it. Everything bad that could happen does, and Patches, until the end of the song—and, we assume, until the end of his life—is haunted by his dead father’s admonition: “I’m depending on you, son.” Patches does what it takes, doesn’t he, and we’re meant to love him for it, to celebrate this.
“Patches” is not autobiographical. “Patches” is a total fiction, which I can’t argue is what makes it a bad song, but it should change the way we hear it. A few years back, in a reflection on the March Sadness tournament, Ander Monson wrote, “Our appetite in America these days is for our sadness to be personal, authentic, and autobiographical, perhaps in part because in our intensely consumer culture we feel less individual all the time… it figures that we’re hungry for evidence of others’ individuality and realness.”
Perhaps you’ll think this song is bad because it is untrue. Carter really is from Alabama, but he didn’t work the fields to provide for his family. Songfacts.com reports that Carter’s version “was so convincing that many listeners thought Carter was telling the story of his life, which was even more remarkable considering he was blind. Carter said that he sometimes felt like a fraud after receiving letters from fans praising his dedication to his family and citing him as an inspiration.”
In the 2013 documentary Muscle Shoals, producer Rick Hall talks as if “Patches” is his song. This attachment makes some sense; it is a song about grieving a father who depends on a son to do the things he never could accomplish himself, and Hall’s father died in a farming accident, but this was after Rick was grown, had found some success, and had bought his father the tractor he himself had never been able to afford. That same tractor overturned, and Hall’s father died. “It was my story, about me and my father,” Hall says.
Carter’s take on it is a little different. He’d recorded hits with Hall before, and as he recalls it, “I was playing in Texas, and Rick Hall called me and told me he had a song he wanted me to come up and do. When Rick played the song to me, I said ‘we going the wrong direction.’” Rick remembers that, too. “He didn’t like the song because he thought it was a downer for his people, for the black people.”
The racial politics of a song about barely scraping by on a farm in Alabama are certainly worth considering, as are the politics of the song’s ascension. No one says “cotton” or “sharecropping” in the song itself, but it’s no stretch to imagine that’s exactly how everyone at FAME pictured it. Earlier in Muscle Shoals, Wilson Pickett remembers arriving in Alabama and driving up to the studio: “We went through the cotton patch. People still picking cotton. I said ‘Is that what I think it is?’ … You could see the studio from the cotton patch.” The documentary highlights some degree of apprehension on both sides—from black artists frankly scared to be traveling to Alabama in the sixties and meanwhile skeptical about what this white man and his white band might know about making funky soul records, as well as from Hall and his white studio crew recognizing the dirty looks they got taking black people out to dinner in town—but on the whole, everyone seems to agree (on screen and in retrospect, anyway) that the studio was a largely safe place insulated from the surrounding racial tension. As Carter puts it, “You just worked together. You never thought about who was white, who was black. You thought about the common thing, and it was the music.”
While the context of the song, the context of a white producer recording almost exclusively black acts right on the heels of the Civil Rights movement in Alabama feels important to note, the simple fact of the song remains: it’s a downer no matter whose song it is.
In truth, it’s not Hall’s song, and it’s not Carter’s story either. It’s General Johnson and Ron Dunbar’s story, and I emphasize “story” here precisely because it was never autobiography, even before Hall connected with it and Carter claimed it for his fourth album. Chairmen of the Board released “Patches” as a B-side to “Everything’s Tuesday,” but Johnson’s label was skeptical about releasing it as a single. Compare it to their best-known hit, “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” the jazzy jam from their self-titled first album, the cover of which shows the guys posing, dapper in wide-lapeled white disco suits. Johnson pleads in that song too, to be sure, but it’s sly and hopeful—the faux lament of a man in love who still sounds pretty sure it’s going to work out. In “Patches,” the plea comes from a father to his preteen son, begging him to take care of the whole family, and it sounds only as hopeful as any prayer could possibly be. Was “Patches” going to be a finger-snapping hit for smiling lovers who are only pretending they don’t believe their “love will grow” because it is polite, and sometimes sexy, not to act too certain? No, it was not going to be.
It did get Johnson and Dunbar that songwriting Grammy, though it’s hard to separate the merit of “Patches” as a song from its commercial success as a Clarence Carter record. If the award is for songwriting, we can at least praise the chorus, which communicates, indeed reiterates, the heart of the song’s anguish. That it does so over and over is a little questionable, but hey, if it works, keep doing it. The verses though? No one could call them poetry.
Consider the early couplet in which Patches thinks about his dad: “Education he never had/ but he did wonders when the times got bad.” Most will agree that the inversion of normal speech patterns to force is a rhyme is Never Good. Neither is twisting up the whole sense of how people talk, as in, “The little money from the crops he raised/ barely paid the bills we made.” When I say I made rent, that means I did manage to pay it. I suppose it could mean that I made my electric bill higher by running the space heater a lot when the radiators were acting up, but as a general rule, broke people get bills (just ask Destiny’s Child)—it’s companies that make them.
Or how about when Patches “told [his] mama [he] was gonna quit school, but she said that was Daddy's strictest rule,” which makes it sound like Daddy’s rule was to, in fact, quit school, when surely that’s the last thing he wanted Patches to do? We can read between the lines to find the intended sense in them, sure, but if we keep going with this verse, we find the following:

So I told mama I was gonna quit school
But she said that was daddy's strictest rule

So every morning 'fore I went to school
I fed the chickens and I chopped wood too

Slant rhymes are A-OK, but I’ll maintain any day of the week that rhyming a word with that same word is a cheat. (Ask anyone who knew me in middle school about my favorite rant: a lengthy bashing of the Meow Mix jingle, freshly popularized among teenagers at the time thanks to Dr. Evil, for its forced rhyming of “liver” and “deliver,” which I’d be willing to accept only if it were written “the liver,” which would then scan OK with “de-liver.”)
To my ear, if there’s anything at all that saves this song from its ham-fisted, maudlin, bootstrapping, moralistic lyrics fine-tuned to cash in on some generic poor sharecropper version of Black plain, if there’s anything that helps it rise from the slick muddle of masterful instrumentation—all the talent of the Muscle Shoals Horns and the FAME Gang and the strings Hall found in LA all threatening to drown each other out—that a song whose entire premise relies on an allusion of realness and rawness absolutely does not demand, it’s Carter’s voice. Carter himself was nominated in the performance category the year before, for this same song, but he lost out to Aretha Franklin’s “Share Your Love with Me.” But in 1971, the industry powers that be must have thought twice about “Patches” and must’ve concluded that “whoever wrote that was really onto something. This is the best Rhythm & Blues song.”
And maybe it was, or maybe the industry had lost its mind. Maybe, in the midst of the Vietnam war, the aftermath of the Civil Rights marches and integration, the unease of the early years of the Nixon presidency, everyone was feeling a desire for a personalized and specific trauma they could relate to, needed a name for the deep sense of loss and inequality pervading public sentiment. So name it “Patches.” Or possibly it was darker than that, a more insidious nostalgia for a simpler time, some sort of humble rural yonder in which the story of a thirteen-year-old black child who was bullied for looking and being poor could be heard not necessarily as representative of deep-seated inequality but only as a story of resilience, of perseverance, of hard work and the American Dream.
Indeed, if more than a close reading of the lyrics is required to convince the world that this entire song is bad, perhaps even the worst, it is this: the sentimentality, the “affirmation,” the dangerous nostalgia a comfortably predictable blues song casts over a story of childhood trauma that allows us to hear it in a way that makes us love it.
I wasn’t alive when “Patches” was on the radio, but my dad was born in 1955. He was sixteen when “Patches” was having its heyday. He was sixteen when his mother died. My dad was the youngest son in the family, so I don’t imagine either of his parents told him they were depending on him, not like Patches’s dad was. I am pretty sure they didn’t even have chickens. But imagine being sixteen in 1970 with more grief than you know what to do with. I can see how Carter’s beagle’s bay of a sad song might be a place to stash some of those feelings, or a filter to process them through, at a safer and fictionalized distance.
Of course, I never met my grandmother, but I did visit her grave once, in Iowa, where that side of my family no longer lives. I drove through by chance over Memorial Day weekend the summer I was interning in Minneapolis, saw an exit for the small town my dad had lived in, and took it, armed with only an old outdated Garmin (I’m young compared to Clarence Carter and “Patches,” but not compared to iPhones), which I used in an attempt to find the “cemetary.” The Garmin, not as smart as a smartphone, did not autocorrect my misspelling, had no idea what I was looking for. I searched the high school instead, remembering my dad’s football letter jacket, and turn-by-turn directions populated. I might’ve parked in the same spot my dad once sat in his car listening to “Patches,” and when I looked up the hill behind the football field, I could see gravestones.
When I called to tell my dad I’d visited the cemetery, his response was stilted, detached, something to the effect of, “that’s nice.” It was nice, since I was pretty sure no one from the family had been there in decades, which I suddenly had a lot of feelings about, which I knew, even then, my dad would not be the one to help me process. He’s never been a touchy-feely guy. Not an emotional guy. Later, when I asked my mother if he’d told her, she was flabbergasted. “He didn’t hear you,” she said. He doesn’t hear well anyway, so this seemed plausible. “He told me the phone was cutting out, and he didn’t really know what you were talking about, but he played it off. He doesn’t know.” How do you tell your father, a second time, that you went out of your way into rural Iowa to visit the grave of a woman you’d never met, just to tell her hello and that her son was going to be okay after all?
I stopped at a gas station, looking for one of those single roses wrapped in cellophane, maybe, some kind of cheap flower to take back. There were none. I got a Diet Dr. Pepper instead. A man pumping gas in an Army jacket said he’d seen me up the hill, kneeling. He’d been hanging wreaths and asked me who was I remembering? I told him no one, which was the truth. How could I remember a woman I’d never met? But that didn’t make it any less sad, didn’t stop me from crying in front of a stranger.
Similarly, the fact that “Patches” isn’t Carter’s story, that it isn’t something true and remembered, isn’t what makes it a bad song. That doesn’t stop anyone from crying, if all the comments on YouTube are to be believed. So what if Johnson and Dunbar made up a story? Carter and Hall made it a hit. So “Patches” is a fiction, fine, but it is not a good one, and here’s where our problem arises. It’s lazy. “Patches” is a story about a child loving a father who tried hard but remained imperfect, memorialized only in death and impossible expectations, and the song is utterly predictable, front to back. It fails to really let Carter’s voice out of the box. It never transcends its genre shorthand and all the shortcuts both lyrical and narrative. It reveals nothing personal, but it doesn’t lie either, and the absence of both truth and lies yields only the absence of surprise.
In a New York Times Bookends column (2014), Leslie Jamison interrogates the question of sentimentality, namely, should writers avoid it? “Many sentimental narratives have been deeply moving to many people,” she writes, “and it’s worth thinking about the things that make them compelling: their emotional intensity, their sense of stakes and values and feeling and friction, their investment in primal truths and predicaments—yes, common; yes, shared. Sentimentality is simply emotion shying away from its own full implications. Behind every sentimental narrative there’s the possibility of another one—more richly realized, more faithful to the fine grain and contradictions of human experience.”
Behind “Patches” is the story of Rick Hall’s grief over losing his own father, his feelings of complicity and guilt. Behind “Patches” is the story of Carter’s own challenges being black and being blind and being both at once. Behind “Patches” is the story of structural racial and economic inequality. Behind “Patches” is the story of the Civil Rights South. Behind “Patches” is the story of how my grandmother died and why I worried my dad might. Behind “Patches” are so many sad stories we studiously avoid telling each other. But “Patches” is standing in its own way. We never get there.
Its slick production muffles any sense of real feeling. It revels in the most dangerous kind of nostalgia: that holy American Protestant reverence for work and sacrifice born of a deeply oppressive moralism that preempts anyone’s individual agency, that affirms struggle and sacrifice, that damns the desire to dare to ask for more, that insists that “enough is as good as a feast.” But it sure wasn’t enough for Patches, was it? And the song itself is not enough, either, except in the way that enough is enough is enough already. Any possible pathos is only buried beneath all the pandering.
“Good god,” Sara says in the kitchen in Denver. The chorus goes on and on at the end, as Patches’s dad’s admonishment haunts the whole thing into a slow fade-out that declines to give closure—perhaps the best production choice on the whole track. “How many times is he going to sing that?”
“I didn’t think it was possible,” says my brother, “but the real thing is even worse than Dad’s version.”

Ashley Strosnider (pictured here in 1994, the year she first heard the song "Patches" on a Yak Bak 2) is a writer and editor, born and raised down south, currently living in Nebraska where she is Managing Editor at Prairie Schooner and the African Poetry Book Fund and a freelance book editor. Her creative work appears in Joyland, New South, Nashville Review, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others.