Cake, Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town, Extra Value (2004)
Covering a Kenny Rogers song would have been criminal for an alt band 20 years ago. This ironic and post-modern decade has seen to the abolition of negative credit for doing some acharacteristic of your culture. No matter where you’re from you can pretty much make any kind of cultural reference and be celebrated for it (if anyone notices). This is fundamentally a really goddamned good song, Kenny Rogers or not. Cake’s version is all hip and stuff, but it’s still catchy and all that regardless. Enjoy it.
You’ve painted up your lips
And rolled and curled your tinted hair
Ruby are you contemplating
Going out somewhere
The shadow on the wall
Tells me the sun is going down
Oh Ruby
Don’t take your love to town
It wasn’t me
Who started that old crazy Asian war
But I was proud to go
And do my patriotic chore
And yes, it’s true that
I’m not the man I used to be
Oh, Ruby
I still need some company
Its hard to love a man
Whose legs are bent and paralyzed
And the wants and the needs of a woman your age
Ruby I realize,
But it won’t be long I’ve heard them say until I’m not around
Oh Ruby
Don’t take your love to town
She’s leaving now cause
I just heard the slamming of the door
The way I know I’ve heard it slam
Some one hundred times before
And if I could move I’d get my gun
And put her in the ground
Oh Ruby
Don’t take your love to town
Oh Ruby for God’s sake turn around
