"Follow Me" by Uncle Kracker

Because I am a hardcore masochist I love - for the sake of blog fodder - to tell the story of the day I heard that Uncle Kracker (aka Matthew Shafer, born on this day in 1974) was getting married...
Like the comedian I am, as soon as I found myself among people I brought this up, and openly speculated about the identity of his bride*. In retrospect, given the deadly earnest nature of the group I was meeting with - and given the dearth, nay even the paucity, of a sense of humour inherent in that class - perhaps referring to this woman as Aunt Spread was not a good idea.

Indeed, it wasn't. I was instantly branded as worse than Hitler (and worse) for having just been a total misogynist and dupe to the patriarchy; similarly I was once likened to Dow Chemical by the same group for wearing scented deodorant, and I won't even bother you with the time I accidentally wore a t-shirt from the Vancouver Aquarium and made one of them actually burst into tears. But I digress... Throughout the rest of the evening I was made to feel like a shitheel for having just made a joke I knew many of them would be repeating as their own later**.

A n y w a y... Originally a protege of Kid Rock, Uncle Kracker came into his own following the release of 2001's Double Wide, which spawned the surprisingly mellow smash hit Follow Me - a paean to the joys of dating married women, but without the sleazy connotations a similar song by, say, Shaggy might have. It's apt to play it here, I think, because summer is soon upon us, and this is one of those songs that, whenever I hear it, makes me feel like I'm drifting down a river in an innertube at the height of summer - even though, sadly, I've never the occasion to do such a thing...

*A lovely woman, I'm sure, named Melanie.
**It probably goes without saying, but I have since severed all ties with these judgemental schmucks.
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