Four years ago, I was blown away by comedian/musician Jon Lajoie's song "A New Beginning", which was inspired by a childhood viewing of Debi Sue Voorhees' death scene in FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING, and the accompanying video, which recreated that NEW BEGINNING scene. Now Lajoie – under his TERMINATOR 2-inspired folk music moniker Wolfie's Just Fine – has released a song and video that pays tribute to another genre movie that had a major impact on him in his youth, TREMORS.
This song is called "Trying to Sleep", and it was written from the perspective of a Graboid, one of the subterranean creatures that dedicate themselves to trying to eat Kevin Bacon and his co-stars in the 1990 classic. The song was originally released in 2018, on a six-song Wolfie's Just Fine EP that was called Perfection, Nevada. With a lot of extra time on his hands during the pandemic lockdown, Lajoie decided to cut together a video for "Trying to Sleep" using footage from TREMORS. The video is embedded above.
Here's what he had to say about it:
This is my love letter to the 1990 B-Horror movie Tremors, which, for many reasons, had a big impact on me as a 10 year old (and subsequently, for the rest of my life). A little backstory…
The songs I write as Wolfie’s Just Fine often take place in the worlds of pop culture from my youth. Without saying too much about it, the Wolfie’s Just Fine EP “Perfection, Nevada” thematically lives in the world of the movie Tremors, and the song “Trying to Sleep” is written from the point of view of one of the Graboids. I’ve always wanted to shoot a music video for this song, but in the end, the visuals I saw were so intertwined with the movie that it kind of felt like sacrilege to attempt to superimpose other images onto it. And since I’m social distancing, and have A LOT of time on my hands, I made this.
Breaking it down shot by shot was an absolute joy, and made me love and appreciate the movie even more than I already did. I’m forever grateful that the director, Ron Underwood, screenwriters Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson, and the entire cast and crew came together 30 years ago to make a strange and unique piece of timeless pop culture, that, not only entertained me, but provided a world for me to explore and get lost in 30 years later.
p.s. Disclaimer!! I don’t own the rights to any of the footage (Universal does!). I’m not making money off this video in any way (it’s not monetized anywhere), and so I hope maybe the creators and copyright owners will see this for what it is, a loving homage to their brilliant, and lasting work. (And free promotion! It’s streaming on Netflix right now, go watch it!)
FRIDAY THE 13TH, TERMINATOR, TREMORS… Lajoie and I were kids around the same time, and we were watching the same movies.