I was writing on the train on the way into work this morning, and when I started to get close to my station I powered down the laptop and popped in the earbuds for the final leg of the journey. I had my music on shuffle, and between The Butthole Surfers and Warren Zevon lay ‘Writing’ by Elton John. I must have heard this before, I’ve owned a copy of Captain Fantastic and the Brown dirt Cowboy for a long time, but it’s not my favourite album and I guess I never really listened to the words before. Anyway, it’s a rather wonderful little song about (you guessed it) writing, and it put me in a great mood and got me thinking about Stephen King. Primarily because I always think about Stephen King when I think about writing, but also because Captain Fantastic is the same album that ‘Someone saved my life tonight appears on’. I’m not the greatest fan of The Dark Tower series either, but given that the song is mentioned approximately fourteen hundred times in quick succession even I couldn’t miss the significance of that (I’m joking of course, in reality it is many, many more times than that). Okay, so I liked ‘Writing’ so much I looked up the lyrics to make sure I heard them all correctly and found that it was published by Big Pig Music, which instantly made me think of the Dixie Pig. Then I thought about the album some more and remembered that there’s also a song on it called ‘The Tower of Babel’.
Am I really,really,really,really,really late to the party? Does The Dark Tower owe a much bigger debt to ‘Captain Fantastic and the Brown dirt cowboy’ than I realised? Or am I just reading way too much into this and in desperate need of coffee?