When Supersuckers and Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs frontmen Eddie Spaghetti & Frank Meyer  (respectively) teamed up for the album Motherfuckin’ Rock ‘n’ Roll (Kitten Robot Records) in the middle of the pandemic and things were looking mighty grim, their collective creativity kept them going. While much of the 10-song opus is the high-energy, hedonistic raunch ‘n’ roll one would expect from these veteran punk rockers, the moody, countrified “Top Shelf Shame” is the clear exception. 

“Eddie wrote this one and it really struck home for me,” says Meyer about the follow-up to their cover of the ’80s hit,”My Sharona” by The Knack. Reeling from real-world challenges piling up from Covid’s stranglehold on everyday life, Meyer’s morale had been dipping below the surface. “At the time, I had been laid off my job due to the pandemic which was going on a lot longer that we had all anticipated,” he continues. “As a single father collecting unemployment with a 17-year-old daughter who was doing her senior year of high school from Zoom in my living room while managing to keep her day job at a clothes store, I felt a lot of private shame and guilt about my situation. I was also drinking more because… you know, it seemed like the world was ending so what the hell else was there to do? Then Eddie sends me this song about shame and booze and I thought, ‘Wow, it’s like he’s in my head.’ So I asked him what was in his mind when he wrote it.”

Eddie succinctly describes, “It’s a song about feeling the shame of having done the shamefully shameful things you’re ashamed of shamefully having maybe done in a shameful moment of shamefully shameful shame.”  

So there you have it.