MOVIES & LYRICS: How GREASE Inspired "Sin Wagon" by The Chicks

Movies & Lyrics is our new blog series that takes a glance at the influence of screenwriters on musicians and songwriters. With each new post, we’ll take known songs and examine how a particular turn of phrase or thematic element was inspired by a film (and specifically the film’s screenplay).

What is a “Sin Wagon”?

While you won’t find a formal definition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, you can find context clues in this script excerpt:

The above is a scene from Grease — Screenplay by Bronte Woodard; Adaptation by Alan Carr; Based on the Original Musical by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey.

It’s the rockin’ 1950s. Danny gets a little too close for comfort to Sandy in his car at the drive-in movie theater. In a departure from the stage show, Sandy proclaims she’s not going to stay with Danny anymore in this SIN. WAGON.

For Grease’s Sandy, a “Sin Wagon” is something to hightail it away from. Fast.

For Natalie Maines, avid fan of Grease and lead singer of the country trio The Chicks (formerly known as Dixie Chicks), the phrase held gravitas. Enough gravitas to scrawl down in her notebook of song ideas.

The cinematic influence on songwriters/musicians knows no constraints of genre. This week we look at how a beloved movie adaptation of a classic Broadway musical inspired a song on a watershed album in country music.

Fly, The Chicks’ sophomore album, came out in 1999. In the nearly 25 years since its release, its songs of liberation, irreverence and general raising of hell have influenced countless artists both in and outside of the country music sphere. Fly is the album that made Taylor Swift want to take up songwriting.

The Chicks—Natalie Maines and instrumental virtuosos/sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer —have origins in Dallas, Texas as a street corner bluegrass band. The band’s bluegrass sound became somewhat buried when they initially went the big label/commercial route. “Sin Wagon,” the eighth track on Fly, brings it rollicking back.

So, as presented in Woodard and Carr’s screenplay, what is a “sin wagon”?

As established earlier, for Sandy, a sweet, innocent musical theater character, a sin wagon is the devil’s playground, something to get away from.

But a sin wagon as imagined by Natalie Maines in her notebook and turned into a song with the help of her co-writers, Stephony Smith and bandmate Emily Strayer, is something entirely different.

The first time I heard it, it was like hearing punk music for the first time—acoustic, twangy punk. At times, it seemed almost too potent. “Sin Wagon” is a reclamation of sorts, a reclamation of personal agency, of sexuality. Furthermore, it’s a reclamation of a hard bluegrass sound. It seems to be the tale of a woman on a bender. The lyrics are below:

He pushed me 'round
Now I'm drawin' the line
He lived his life
Now I'm gonna go live mine
I'm sick of wastin' my time
Well now I've been good for way too long
Found my red dress and I'm gonna throw it on
'Bout to get too far gone

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
Need a little bit more of my twelve ounce nutrition
One more helpin' of what I've been havin'
I'm takin' my turn on the sin wagon

On a mission to make something happen
Feel like Delilah lookin' for Samson
Do a little mattress dancin'
That's right I said mattress dancin'

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
Need a little bit more
Of what I've been missin'
I don't know where I'll be crashin'
But I'm arrivin' on a sin wagon

When it's my turn to march up to old glory
I'm gonna have one hell of a story
That's if he forgives me
Oh, lord please forgive me

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
Need a little bit more of that sweet salvation
They may take me
With my feet draggin'
But I'll fly away on a sin wagon

I'll fly away on a sin wagon

Perhaps the song is sung by the bad girl, leather jacket-wearing, cigarette-smoking version of Sandy who chooses to literally fly off into the sunset in the “sin wagon” with Danny at the end. After all, “I’ll fly away” is iterated twice at the end of the song…

Either way, it’s inspiring to think the phrase started in a screenplay…

Until next time!

MOVIES & LYRICS: Nas' "The World Is Yours" and Oliver Stone's "Scarface"

Movies & Lyrics is our new blog series that takes a glance at the influence of screenwriters on musicians and songwriters. With each new post, we’ll take known songs and examine how a particular turn of phrase or thematic element was inspired by a film (and specifically the film’s screenplay).

Rapper Nas’ lyrics feel like cinema.

In them, there’s more than poetry. His rhymes contain painstaking detail of places, of people, of specific street corners, of small transactions, of every human emotion, from blowhard confidence to the lowest depths of despair.

Nowhere is this more true than on his 1994 debut album Illmatic, a canonical work in hip-hop and widely regarded as one of the best albums of all time.

According to Nas himself, in his youth, he loved movies and wrote screenplays (in addition to rhymes, of course). Though he ultimately pursued rapping, there’s no question about the filmic influence on Nas’ artistic sensibility.

This week, we look at a Nas song inspired by this excerpt of Oliver Stone’s screenplay for Scarface (1983), an enduringly controversial and popular film remake about a Cuban refugee who arrives during the Mariel Boatlift in Miami and moves from poverty to power, becoming a malevolent (and ultimately doomed) drug lord:

“THE WORLD IS YOURS” is a significant phrase in Scarface. Here in the script, Stone takes care to give the words their own line—and he bolds and underlines them. Young, fictional Tony Montana drinks them in.

We see the words a second time when Tony marries Elvira, the wife of his former boss Frank Lopez. Tony has made “THE WORLD IS YOURS” the catchphrase of his… uh… business operation.

Finally, we see “THE WORLD IS YOURS” reflected in the pool after Tony’s downfall when he’s shot to death in his own pool. A real aristotelian ending for an anti-hero.

The appearance of the phrase adheres to the storytelling convention of rule of three. In the script we see “The World Is Yours” examined from multiple vantage points.

No one needs this blog post to plumb the influence of the gangster film genre on rap and hip-hop. There’s plenty of great literature and scholarship on this topic. For decades, MCs have espoused their reverence for everything from The Public Enemy (1931) to The Godfather Trilogy and especially to Scarface.

A cadre of rappers, in their lyrics (and in Houston rapper Scarface’s case, in name), have tended to equivocate themselves to Tony Montana’s sheer violent outlaw power. Nas himself on the track “NY State of Mind” asserts: “I'm like Scarface sniffin' cocaine / Holdin' an M16, see, with the pen I'm extreme / Now, bullet holes left in my peepholes / I'm suited up with street clothes, hand me a .9 and I'll defeat foes.”

It’s on another Illmatic track that Nas takes a sublter approach. “The World Is Yours” is a song less about emulating Scarface and more about finding inspiration in his mantra.

Just as the phrase “THE WORLD IS YOURS” resonates with Tony Montana, it also resonates with Nas.

The song “The World Is Yours” (co-written with Pete Rock) is a moment of weightlessness and optimism amidst otherwise brutal subjects as Nas holds a metaphorical and unrelenting camera up to his young life in the rough Queensbridge public housing development in Queens, New York. This track comes right after “Life’s a Bitch” where the refrain is “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

Here, producer Pete Rock’s sampling and looping of Ahmad Jamal’s “I Love Music” feels like sonic equivalent of magic realism. Some of the lyrics:

(It's yours)
Whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
(It's yours)
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?

I sip the Dom P, watchin' Gandhi 'til I'm charged, then
Writin' in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin
To hold the mic I'm throbbin', mechanical movement
Understandable smooth shit that murderers move with
The thief's theme, play me at night, they won't act right
The fiend of hip-hop has got me stuck like a crack pipe
The mind activation, react like I'm facin'
Time like Pappy Mason, with pens I'm embracin'
Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the streets
Suede Timbs on my feet makes my cipher complete
Whether cruisin' in a Sikh's cab or Montero Jeep
I can't call it, the beats make me fallin' asleep
I keep fallin', but never fallin' six feet deep
I'm out for presidents to represent me (Say what?)
I'm out for presidents to represent me (Say what?)
I'm out for dead presidents to represent me

Whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
(It's yours)
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?

It sounds like the kind of hope you can only find in New York City. (Is it coincidental that Oliver Stone is from NYC too?)

That’s the thing about Illmatic. It’s never one emotion at once, which is a good lesson for writers of all kinds to take in. It’s grief and a little hope as you “spit phlegm on the streets” with “Suede Timbs on your feets.”

A chant, an incantation perhaps, to be held and examined by all and from many angles.

THE WORLD IS YOURS.

Until next time…

MOVIES & LYRICS: Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" and Terrence Malick's "Badlands"

For screenwriters, inspiration can take many forms. For some, it's poetry or other forms of literature. For others, it's music or theater or TV shows or the work of certain filmmakers.

But what about the influence of screenwriters on other artists? 

For this new blog series, we're taking a fun look at the influence of screenwriters on musicians and songwriters. With each new post, we'll take a known song and examine how a specific turn of phrase or thematic element was inspired by a film (and specifically a film's screenplay). 

This week, we'll start subtle and slow with the title track of Bruce Springsteen's haunting, understated 1982 album Nebraska. "Nebraska" the song was never a huge, propulsive radio hit... but it's a very cinematic place to start. 

Bruce Springsteen has never been shy about sharing the influence of certain films and filmmakers on his songwriting and album conceptualization. In addition to being a John Ford fan, the Boss was greatly influenced by Terrence Malick, particularly Malick's directorial debut, Badlands, which was released in 1973 (coincidentally the same year as Springsteen's own debut album Greetings from Asbury Park).

Springsteen's songs and Malick's films have some commonalities—like outsiders looking to transcend or just bust out and hit the road from their small, sad and confining towns. And, of course, it's all done with poetry and lyricism.

Recorded as a series of demos on a 4-track cassette recorder by Springsteen alone in his home studio, Nebraska the album deals with regular, down-and-out characters (a lot of criminals and murderers) many of whom face intense crises or reckonings over the course of the songs. Nebraska is one album Springsteen never toured to promote because the subject matter is bleak. 

The first track on the album, the title track "Nebraska," is based specifically on Badlands. 

Badlands, the film, was Terrence Malick's first as a director. It tells the story of a young couple on a crime spree across the midwest in the 1950s. The film is loosely inspired by real-life spree-killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. 

Listen to the track and see this excerpt of page 5 of Malick’s screenplay where characters Kit and Holly meet for the first time.

Holly twirls a baton on her front lawn... It's one of the first things we see in the film, as well as the lyric that opens the whole album. 

I saw her standing on her front lawn just twirling her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died
From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path
I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun
Now, the jury brought in a guilty verdict, and the judge he sentenced me to death
Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest
Sheriff, when the man pulls that switch, sir, and snaps my poor head back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin' right there on my lap
They declared me unfit to live, said into that great void my soul'd be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world

It's interesting to note that Springsteen was also inspired by the work of author Flannery O'Connor. The last two lyrics of "Nebraska" when the title character is about to be executed for his crimes and the authorities ask him why he did what he did, he says cagily: "Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world." The lyric bares a resemblance to the last few lines of the character "The Misfit" in O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," where he talks about "No pleasure but meanness." 

It's a good reminder that art is a crucible where numerous influences can coexist. 

“Nebraska” isn’t the only track on the album with the mark of Badlands on it. The final track on the album “Reason to Believe” opens with lyrics about a man standing over a dead dog and poking it with a stick. The very same image opens Badlands.

With Nebraska and, indeed, all of his music, Bruce Springsteen is an inspiration for many a writer of film and television. His songs appear on countless soundtracks. The song "State Trooper" from Nebraska is featured as the end credits song in an episode of The Sopranos.  In his songs, there's a vibe. The same vibe can be found in the pages of Terrence Malick's Badlands screenplay. 

This second draft of Badlands is available to read in the WGF Library. Search our catalog to see what other scripts we have and make an appointment to visit us and find your inspiration.

Until next time!