Augie March ‘A Dog Starved’
“A Dog Starved” is the second single to be released from the forthcoming Augie March album Havens Dumb.
Muddy and familiar tracks lead into the room where no-one goes, only I know its true dimensions - in a hotel on a burning shore, derelict and furnished by the war that no-one ever mentions
Give it all away, baby give it all away, nobody wants to hear about the price you pay, you’re a dog starved.
Everybody knows their own, stick to their imaginary zones to keep the information. We only differ from the rat, given a stranger in the pack, in how we improvise to tear the strips from him.
Give it all away, baby give it all away, nobody wants to hear about the price you pay, you’re a dog starved.
Now do you play the beating organ for attention or to effect a gerrymander of the soul, you hear the murmuring of mournful incantation “don’t re-enrol, don’t re-enrol”
Today you only have to play along, or make it seem as though you tried, Or did I ever only play along? Why would I?
Half an hour of rain, half an hour of sun, In ode to violence the island sings its uncanny song and I can only think I don’t belong, and is this oblivion, is this oblivion?
And so the pattern will repeat, see the same worm at the same sheet, where all desires seem to wane or taper. You say no worst, now there is none, look how the palimpsest has won, how father breaches son like brick through wallpaper…
Give it all away, baby give it all away, nobody wants to hear about the price you pay, you’re a dog starved. Give it all away, I’ve got to give it all away, I’ve got to give it all away,
Just a dog starved.
The song was produced by Glenn Richards in Hobart and Melbourne and mixed by long-time Augie alumni Paul McKercher.
The band recently announced they were returning to action after a five-year hiatus, and that they had been putting together an album in the latter half of that break.
“A Dog Starved” was a track that arrived late in the album process: “Blake, Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas all vie for the pedant’s ear in
this power pop excursion, not to mention Big Star, XTC and maybe more recently, via XTC, Field Music. For all that heavyweight arty dick swinging it was from a dearth of brawn and a surplus of brain in evidence at what
I’d mistakenly thought was the end of the project that “A Dog…” came, tail wagging. It became hurtfully clear that it was for me to go back into the pit and swing a little harder at the face, maybe even shirt off this time, do the shale dance into the hard rock. I wielded my brother’s old red hollow Silvertone and got some nice tones. Four days of basic tracking later we had four new songs, including this one.
— Glenn Richards
