Ten, twenty, thirty, forty
Fifty, a hundred, go for the glory
Swing arm straight on, successful sortie
It’s all right
Ten gets you closer, twenty a bit further
Thirty closer to the edge, forty looks of murder
It’s that fifty we’re aiming for, the great inserter
Well it’s all right
Don’t bounce it off the wall just to try to get that hundred
Shoot too far and zero is the price to pay when you blunder it
But you can’t resist the risk to miss
It’s the nightly addiction.
Quarter triple play, nine chances
To give it all you got let down those defenses
Throw to the wind all the consequences
It’s all right
And when we’ve exhausted all our tries
With heady victory blinding our eyes
We’ll pool our tickets and go for the prize
Well it’s all right
Fire trails behind that ball on its way to the top
Smoke trails in the aisle, don’t want this thing to ever stop
On a roll to that maximum goal
It’s our nightly addiction
Each night we take our dependency and feed it
We build up our resolve and then defeat it
‘Cause we don’t just want it, we need it
Reckless dereliction
The smitten affliction
The nightly addiction
The nightly addiction …
I got that one-hand drive right up your alley
Till the highest score is my final tally
I’ll be the champion in your arcade rally
It’s all right (if you just let me)
It ain’t just el-cheapo action
It ain’t just quick-fix satisfaction
It’s my intense unbridled passion
Well it’s all right (you’re gonna get me)
Now it’s your game ‘cause the rules you made, so follow ‘em to the letter
And if you score high, great, but if you don’t, then even better
It’ll be my delight to set you right
In this nightly addiction
Love is a game of skee ball, baby
This kind of love is a game of skee ball, baby
©2024 The Hesh Inc.
This is, quite simply, a song about an illicit affair, told metaphorically via the game of skee ball. Without going into too much detail, let's just say that I was involved in both, shortly after I moved to the Jersey Shore in the early 1990s.
Musically, I took the bass line from Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" and turned it into a minor key, and constructed the whole song around that groove. While attending Brookdale Community College some time later in the decade, I took courses in electronic music, and one of the songs I produced in the school music lab was this one, performed on an array of synths. Playing it back to a friend who frequented local dance clubs, she remarked that she never imagined I'd make "club music," but there you are.
I made this part of the latter 'chapters' of my Soul In Exile opus, and will probably record it with a full band in the near future. It might lose some of its purported 'danciness,' but such is the price to pay.