Sharpshootin' At The Senator

Album: Elan (bonus track) (1995)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Sharpshootin' At The Senator" is exactly what it sounds like: a song about assassinating senators. Firefall founding member Larry Burnett explained in a Songfacts interview: "It's sort of me trying to observe something I actually hadn't ever really seen, which was the mind of a guy who would assassinate a political figure. And it's really heavy, hard rock cool, so it's a cool song. We used to play it in person and people would go nuts. We loved playing it. It was intense.

    It's about how a guy could become so unhappy with things. You know, people blame stuff on all kinds of other stuff, they don't take much responsibility. And it's convenient to blame things on the government. And their attitude is, 'My personal problems are because Senator Somebody isn't representing me right, so my family's suffering.' That's where that came from, it was an imagination. It was imagining somebody that unhappy and willing to kill a political figure."
  • This was written for Firefall's third album, Elan, but Atlantic Records refused to put this song on a record. The song didn't appear until 1995, when it was included as a bonus track on the CD release.

    Larry Burnett thought it was left off the album due to the touchy subject matter, but later discovered the real reason: His mother, after Larry played her the song, wrote a letter to Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun asking him not to release the song because she was worried about how it would come off and how it would reflect on her son. Ertegun complied, and it wasn't until years later that Larry learned about the letter.

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