“There was once a prince who acted strangely in that
He thought life was stupid and it was for him so
He made up a world in which he liked the things we liked
But he had different reasons why he liked them…”
Out of the basement comes yet another song from my childhood. I realized it was going through my head as I was getting ready this morning. If you are not familiar with it, it’s from The Mason Williams Phonograph Album and called The Prince’s Panties. I still remember every word of the fool thing. It has a lovely pun ending and the Prince, who is not a very nice man, gets his just reward.
It’s a great album with a lot of very beautiful music, but this song definitely lets you know how he was able to make his living writing for the Smothers Brothers for so many years before launching his own career. He has a quirky sense of reality. He wrote a song called Sunflower for the album. It was the soundtrack for what he referred to as “the world’s largest piece of art,” if I remember the quote correctly. He had a skywriter draw a stem and leaves in the air in time for the sun to rise into it.