Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 39-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
“Fan Of Sparks” was one of several songs written during a coast-to-coast tour in the USA in 1989 that had me wondering about the people living in what seemed to us to be the middle of nowhere in rural Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, etc., based on what we saw from the highway and experienced when we pulled off to eat at cafes. Utilitarian houses in the middle of fields, plain cooking, farming, hunting, coal mining with some form of Christianity resulting in a culture utterly different than ours except for glimpses offered in music, books and movies.
“Fan Of Sparks” from Jarred Up (K, 1995) (download):
