This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
You’ve seen those ads in the supermarket rags: ‘Poems Wanted for Songs,’ they say, or — if they’re more honest — ‘Have Your Poems Set to Music.’ Who would be crazy enough to take them up on it? These people would.
The jaw-droppingly strange American Song-Poem Anthology contains the unintentionally hilarious efforts of more than two dozen average Americans who plunked down their hard-earned cash to have anonymous studio musicians turn their amateurish scribblings into zippy ’60s and ’70s pop tunes. To call these tunes unique is the utmost in both diplomacy and understatement. Here you’ll find hilariously inept odes to past presidents (Jimmy Carter Says ‘Yes’), medical centres (City’s Hospital Patients), astronauts (The Moon Men), love gone oddly wrong (I Lost My Girl To An Argentinian Cowboy), hippies (Convertibles and Headbands) and even the colour yellow (I Like Yellow Things). But for my money, the strangest of all — and easily the creepiest — is All You Need Is A Fertile Mind, which advocates (I’m not making this up, I swear) masturbation without the aid of pornography. “To build up that sexual impetus,” writes Gene Marshall, “you don’t need to find a woman like Venus.” Now that’s poetry.
