Nine days after the inspiration for “Attack on Love,” the seed of another song on Electr-o-pura is sown. At a Salvation Army prior to soundchecking at the Stone Lounge in Tampa on this date in 1994, I found My Little Corner of the World by Richie Van. It had a lot to recommend the risk of a dollar: it was autographed, it was on Art Records, and there was a cover of “Joy to the World.” Turned out to be a fake live album–electric guitar, vocal and drum machine recorded in a studio, each song greeted by mismatched applause–allegedly from a (nonexistent?) Florida nightspot, the Deep Jigger Lounge. No songwriting credits and our less-than-encyclopedic knowledge of the career of Anita Bryant allowed us to mistake the title track for a Richie Van original. Georgia sang it for the first time at the Fez, backed by me and Bruce Bennett. My mom was in the audience that night and told us she was singing along. Once we ascertained that she was not familiar with Richie Van’s oeuvre, we realized that the song was in fact a standard. We got a nice return on my investment: Richie Van appears in “The Hour Grows Late,” our version of “My Little Corner of the World” closed I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, and my mom has sung it with us pretty much annually since 2007.
