The Nameless One

Album: Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a track from Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies, a title that refers to the American outlaws and gunslingers of the 19th century. The outlaw theme runs throughout the album including this song as guitarist/vocalist Michael Poulsen explained on Full Metal Jackie's nationally syndicated radio show: "When I started writing, I had no idea where I wanted to go," he said. "It's always tough to find the first four or five songs, because where do you start? Where do you want to go? It always ends up with me starting with ten songs that I trash because I need to be satisfied 100 per cent. I need to have the goosebumps for my own material, so when I find the first three or four songs, I know exactly where I'm going and when those songs came up, I can hear the Western themes, the inspiration from the old spaghetti Western movies.

    "That became a very organic flow to the record," he continued, "those melodies from Western movies, so I thought, 'You'd better start writing some lyrics about these outlaws and gunslingers'; it is movies that I've been watching since I was a little kid. My father was watching it all the time. It's just about the right time to do it, so when I start writing the lyrics, I bring some legendary outlaws and shady ladies to life, then pictures were just running in my head all the time and suddenly you feel you're in that bubble where you're like, 'Okay I'm going somewhere, it's definitely an outlaw theme.'"
  • Though some of the stories told on Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies are real - like Lola Montez, the erotic dancer with her infamous "Spider Dance," this cautionary tale of dabbling in the dark arts is entirely fictional.

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