O dia-a-dia
A woman named Rachel Benbow Murdy (whom those who have bought Soul Coughing's first record may know as the woman who sings over the answering machine on the song "Janine") and I used to listen to Rickie Lee Jones' song "Ghost Train" over and over again. We lived in a building overlooking Sheridan Square in New York, relied on Vietnamese delivery for subsistence, smoked to excess. Our experience of the world was mostly through repeated watchings of the final sequence of Goodfellas and in the incredibly dark, overwhelmingly chilling world of that song, in which a woman gets on a bus and goes to hell. We were youthful hipster wannabes. I think Rachel may have gone to a mirror with Rickie's first record cover, a couple of times, and may have attempted to dangle her cigarette from her mouth in a similar fashion.