It's almost here! This weekend we're going to release My Boots Are Achin' For Your Love, the first single from Dog Legs & Feet's upcoming album.
What can I tell you about Boots
If you ever saw DLF play live, you will have heard this song. We were not ALLOWED to play a gig without including Boots on the setlist. Boots was surely our biggest crowd-pleaser, with the possible exception of Irish Dement.
If you haven't heard it yet, how can I describe it? Well, as I wrote when I pitched Boots to the big editorial playlists a couple of weeks ago, “The song combines folk-punk smirkiness and jug-band bluegrass pickin' into a crowd-pleasing classic that's somehow reminiscent of both Violent Femmes and Old Crow Medicine Show.”
I mean look:
- Barbershop harmonies? Check.
- Blistering banjo AND kazoo solos? Check.
- You'll be able to sing along by the end the first time you hear it? Check.
- Lyrics that deploy wit and irony to deconstruct traditional power dynamics? I'm pretty sure… I mean, I think… let's just say that they do.
Frankly, it was an easy choice to release this as our first single. It would have been weird to pick anything else. This a red-meat fan favorite for Dog Legs & Feet. If you haven't heard it, please do pre-save it and give it a listen once it comes out.
How Boots Came About
Jon Watson wrote the main verses and chorus when he was about 15 years old. When DLF got together, in 1997, it was one of the songs Jon picked to enter into the songwriting contest that gave us our start.
At some point that summer, we did a lot of arranging and augmenting Jon's original text. Michael Mergen and I wrote an extended barbershop-sounding intro section, and we all added lots of harmony vocals, a banjo solo and a kazoo solo, plus a distinctive fingerpicked outro lick which John Botti came up with.
As I mentioned, Boots was a big hit with audiences, and I'm certain we played it at every single show until our last, which would have been in 2008 or so.
A bit of trivia: On this recording, in the banjo solo, Johnbo misses a note, and then the band gets back on track in the next couple of measures. It's something that we could have fixed (via digital editing) in the remastered version, but we decided not to. Part of the reason: on the album (but not the single) you can hear him explaining as the audience bursts into applause, “I was working on a car yesterday and I broke a nail on my middle finger, that's what happened with that note there.” That moment really captures the personality of the band, and it seemed more fun to leave it in than to take it out.
Get ready! The song will go live this Friday, March 24.
Credits
- Jon Watson: Lead vocal, kazoo
- John Botti: Vocals, banjo
- Jeremy Edwards: Vocals, guitar
- Michael Mergen: Vocals, washboard
- Joseph Trent: Vocals, Bass
- Live mixing and recording by Mars Hall and Toren Smith
- Produced by Jeremy Edwards
- Cover artwork by Jeremy Edwards, with images generated using Stable Diffusion AI.