Graham Parker Writes for Songs for Fictional TV Shows

Posted on Apr 9th 2010 4:00PM by Mike Ayers
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It's no secret that getting a song in a popular television show means big bucks for artists these days, and it's even better if your song is chosen as the show's theme song. For old-school rocker Graham Parker, whose recording career dates back to the mid-'70s, it seemed he was potentially heading down that television-theme path to riches as well.

"CD sales are over, let's face it," Parker tells Spinner. "This is a hobby. I'd never considered [composing for television] before, writing on someone else's specifications. I wrote songs for two of them and both got rejected. But I realized that the songs were so good, I thought what if I invented my own TV shows?"

Such is the case for Parker's new album, 'Imaginary Television,' which was released earlier this month. Parker composed 11 tracks that recall his early days of writing New Wave-sounding pop tunes, with television plots he dreamed of as the inspiration. For example, take the song 'See Things My Way': "it's about conjoined twins who form a band called Double Trouble."

Then there's 'Always Greener.' "That one [is] about a woman in Connecticut who's married to an extremely rich investment banker type of guy. [She] wants more; it's never enough. The grass is always greener."

But the stand-out is the album closer, a fun, doo-wop-sounding pop song called '1st Responder.' "It's about the kid who's always stealing cars and his dad has to pick him up. It's a love story, really. His dad's a real doofus."

While Parker's early career was lumped in with Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, he's been plugging along the indie circuit since the '90s and concedes that even though his original pieces of music were rejected, a silver lining exists in 'Imaginary Television.'

"It probably would've been more money for me to get 40 seconds of this music on a television show than I'll make on royalties from this entire album. That's the fact of the matter, but it all worked out in good fortune," he says. "Coming up with an album is good fortune. I realized at some point in my career that the peripheral people in music take themselves so seriously. You cannot underestimate how seriously these motherf---ers take themselves. So, I keep my copy of Rolling Stone next to me and have my publishing company working for me."

'Imaginary Television' is out now on Bloodshot Records.