“Pretend” [The Great Migration]

A mini-series in which D.W. Brandt writes about each song from his debut album, THE GREAT MIGRATION.

It’s been over 100 years of American Music for the Great Migration and me. We’ve been grinding it out any way we can at bars, fairs, carnivals, juke joints, quinceneras, funerals, anything and everything, everywhere and nowhere you’ve heard of. But you should hear this tune.

I heard some folks sayin’ somethin’ like 80 to 90 percent of all stuff in the universe we ain’t got a clue about. So for the most part we just pretend. You might even say life is kinda just a lot of pretending.

And like all of us in life, I’m always waiting for that big break. But it’s always been a road of hills and valleys. I been close before. But all success is fleeting. Back In 1952 I lost the part of Bob Hayward to Robert Stack in “Bwana Devil”, the World’s first “Deepie”, which for all you newcomers is what we used to call 3D movies. But that movie flopped and within the year “Deepies” were dead. Never have guessed they’d be back. You never know what the future holds, you just have to pretend you do.

When I wrote this song I was trying to make it as an actor again, living in a shoebox next to a garage in Burbank, CA, waking up every morning to the view of a three hundred pound chain-smoking woman in a moomoo outside my window, trying to pretend things were on the up and up…Although in reality I’d just had my first mainstream film, MICROMACHINES, the movie dropped in mid-production due to the news of the up and coming TRANSFORMERS. And a year earlier, my pilot, ALEXIS TEXAS, got passed on by Disney for some other kid show.

We all pretend for one reason or another, some for a living, some to feel better about themselves, and some to save the feelings of others. Pretending I suppose is almost a necessity to survival. It’s certainly gotten me through. But inevitably sometimes you’ll find yourself thinking it’s getting hard to pretend. And in times like these you might want to have this song around.