Desert Moon

Album details

Artist: Dennis DeYoung

Year: 1984

Average fodder rating (out of 5): 4

Difficulty: Mostly simple

Assessment of suitability for parodying

The artist of this album used to be a memorable part of the band Styx, who did some increasingly challenging songs with them, but this was his first solo album, and he seemed to drop down from the grandiose likes of Paradise Theatre and Kilroy Was Here to stuff more like what an artist would do for their first work. Some of the songs have a lot of words, but they are mostly not too daunting, at least out of the songs I like. One exception, however, was a song called Gravity, which I passed on for an obviously hard to rhyme title and for unusual, specific topics for a song I could not work with - including (but not limited to) space travel, climbing Mount Everest, and wanting the privilege of getting all kinds of particularly modern things like driving a race car and owning a baseball team.

The original songs I used (in the order they appear on the album)

1. Don’t Wait For Heroes
2. Please
3. Fire
4. Suspicious
5. Dear Darling (I’ll Be There)

The parodies (order changed so that, taken altogether, they tell a story)

1. Davy Jones and Calypso Duet
2. Dear Goddess (I’ll Be There)
3. Vicious
4. Ire
5. Don’t Call Me The Worst

Behind the scenes

• I wrote the parody album in spring 2021
• I like to call the parody album Desert Afterworld.
• Remarks about my creative process with this album are found in Album Story 29: Deal With The Devil.
• This was the first album where I had Davy Jones instead of the semi-anonymous piratical characters singing. (But it is a one-off, so do not get as used to it as one of my beta readers did.)
• This was also the first time I changed the song order to enhance the parody album. Prior to this, I always followed the song order of the original album unless I knew some songs or had ideas for them earlier than others, except in the extremest beginning where my very first attempt at a parody album did the songs from Paradise Theatre in a very different order than they appear on the album, and a following set of attempts at songs from Kilroy Was Here that made one change to the song order by saving Heavy Metal Poisoning for last. But these changes to song order were made for reasons not even I can remember - and, knowing the caricatures I was using at the time, were undoubtedly arbitrary anyway.

Categories

Album categories: Mostly simple albums, 4-fodder albums

Song categories: Dennis DeYoung songs, 1980s songs, 3-fodder songs, 4-fodder songs, 5-fodder songs

Parody subject categories: Parodies telling Davy Jones’ side of the story, parodies about the story of Davy Jones and Calypso, transformation into a monster, parodies about the devil of the sea

Parody style categories: Clever uses of songs, repurposed songs, characterizations