Always Drunk - by Orange Peel

“Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.” - so begins Don Delillo’s 1971 debut novel ‘Americana’.

This year has certainly been lurid, but perhaps we could all do with a bit more dullness. For me, it’s been a fulfilling year in many ways. At a personal level, continuing to watch my little daughter learn and grow has been magical. At a creative level, taking on the challenge of posting a song (almost) every week for a year has been a great project. Demoitis has given this year a sense of focus and fulfillment. And now we are find ourselves on the last day of this year, and I have one final song to share.

‘Always Drunk’ is something of a first for me. It’s a partial cover of a song by a songwriter named Jack Shirt. Back in the mid-late 2000s, I co-ran a small, independent record label named Snakes & Ladders. We released music by our own bands at the time, the Roaring Twenties and the Total Drop, as well as bands like Plugs, Shock Defeat!, Kwes, and John and Jehn (later of Savages and Jehnny Beth fame).

Another songwriter we included on our compilation was Jack Shirt. I think we may have met Jack once, but my memory is hazy, and I don’t remember much about the meeting. Perhaps I’ve imagined it entirely. Anyway, in 2006, we put out a song of his called ‘Lonely Way to Celebrate’ on our (now rare) compilation ‘Worthless Originals.’ The song had a melancholy and mysterious energy, almost like something from The Beatles’ ‘White Album’.

When Jack sent us his music, there was another song on the EP that I loved and wanted to put out. Like ‘Lonely Way to Celebrate’, the song, ‘Always Drunk’ is built around the repetition of a single lyric. The song, which is the opening track on Jack Shirt’s self-titled 2009 album, combines a sweet vocal melody and a waltzing 3/4 time signature with Velvet Underground-esque glockenspiel and dissonant guitars. I loved this song, and elements of it stayed with in my memory, but for years, I didn’t have a copy to listen to because my Snakes & Ladders archive was in storage. I’d strum what I remembered of the song on guitar, improvising other lyrics around Jack’s minimalist original.

For a long time, I couldn’t find any news of Jack Shirt online1, but then, last year, his work appeared online. By this point, I’d already written my own version of the song, part-cover/part original. I recorded a few different versions of this song, but the one I am sharing was recorded back in late November. I recorded the lead vocal and acoustic guitar simultaneously, and then overdubbed the second guitar and double-tracked vocal. I also utilized the Valhalla Supermassive reverb as a sonic layer below the main mix, adding in a layer of existentialist dread that chimes with the song’s lyrics. At the end of my version of ‘Always Drunk’, the two vocals start tripping over each other and singing different lyrics; a technique I used back in January with ‘Rainy Season’.

Lyrically, I wanted each verse to lead into the next. The lyrics reference this time of year, so they felt appropriate for my final song of 2025.

Lyrics:

Sometimes I wish I was always drunk.

always drunk

always drunk.

But sometimes I wish I’d never got drunk

ever got drunk, ever got drunk

in the first place

that I was ever drunk

ever drunk, ever drunk

was your place,

and now I wish I’d never got drunk,

ever got drunk, ever got drunk.

But sometimes I wish

I was drunk all day

like at Christmas time,

when we drink all day,

but then argue all night.

I don’t wanna fight,

like on New Year’s Eve,

when it turned midnight,

and we sang Auld Lang Syne.

And I’ll never drink again.

Never wanna drink again.

Never ever again…

until the weekend,

when we’ll all get drunk,

all get drunk,

all get drunk.

Always.

Etc.

—

Happy New Year! I hope that 2026 brings you health and happiness.

Less lurid, more dull.

Until next year,

James