“This is a song about a dream…”-intro at Sin-é, Jul. 19/Aug. 17, 1993
.
.
.
“It’s derived from juju which is African for magic. Mojo pin, it’s a euphemism. It’s a needle with smack that you stick up your arm. It can be anything you want. Or something just as good. No matter how much you love somebody, somehow there’s always something that can take them away and that’s usually people’s fear-that’s usually why people try to control other people in love and it happens all the time.”-UR Magazine, September, 1994
.
.
.
In discussing the opening song on Grace, “Mojo Pin,” with lines like “If only you’d come back to me/filling up my side/ wouldn’t need no Mojo Pin/to keep me satisfied…” Buckley refers to a “Mojo Pin” as, “a pin with black magic in it.” But when pressed further he replies, “Plainly speaking…it’s a euphemism for a dropper full of smack that you shoot into your arm.”-Art+Performance, October 28, 1994
.
.
.
Is it this vision that also inspires Mojo Pin’s interracial love story? “No, that’s really a dream-inspired song. It’s about when I was in love with a wonderful girl, and there was always something that divided us, no matter how cute or smart you were. A sad love poem.”-Rumore, Nov. 94
.
.
.
“Mojo Pin” is a tale of unrequited lust (“I was pining away for somebody, and I was high when I wrote it”).-Village Voice, November 14, 1994
.
.
.
“This is a song about obsession…sometimes theres somebody, you feel you need, your whole universe tells you you have to have her, sometimes you pick up remnants of theirs, you know, like, you start watching their tv shows when they’re away, you start buying the records that they have in their apartment, you start drinking their drinks, you start smoking their damn cigarettes, you start picking up little inflections in their voice, you know, stupid sayings…sometimes it leads to more dangerous stuff…this is called Mojo Pin.”-London Astoria, Jan. 18, 1995
.
.
.
“This is a song that’s hard to describe, sometimes, you love somebody and you think you’re the only one for them, and you are pretty much, but sometimes there’s always something that’ll take them away from you. Sometimes it’s the devil, and sometimes it’s a man on the corner with a connection.”-introduction at Le Botanique, February 26, 1995
.
.
.
The same process transfoformed the rippling guitar chords and more languid structure of “And You Will” into “Mojo Pin,” a song that could have easily been about a drug addiction, or most likely, the addictive, feverish pull of love. The song tossed together strings of images-“pearls in oyster’s flesh,” “whips of opinion down my back,” a mane of hair that resembles “black ribbons of coal”-that were jumbled but visceral. Jeff told (Rebecca) Moore the song was inspired by a dream in which he saw a young black woman shooting up heroin between her toes. (Later, he told Art & Performance magazine that the phrase “mojo pin” was “a pin with black magic in it”; pressed for more detail, he said. “plainly speaking…it’s a euphemism for a dropper full of smack that you shoot into your arm.”) Whatever the connotation of the phrase “mojo pin,” both that song and “Grace” tapped into two subjects Jeff, thanks largely to his father, had grown to accept as part of life: drugs and death.-from Dream Brother
.
.
.
Opinions are divided on exactly what Buckley was singing about. “Mojo Pin” could have been a statement about an inter-racial romance, as he sometimes stated, or an anti-drug song built around a term best known to junkies, another explanation also offered by Buckley at times. (A syringe full of smack was sometimes known as a mojo pin.) Another time he simply introduced “Mojo Pin” as “a song about a dream.”-from A Pure Drop
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHAT
