Jon Lajoie composes an eerie neo-folk tribute to Friday The 13th: A New Beginning
Jon Lajoie is perhaps best known as guitar strumming, ne’er-do-well “Taco” on FX’s fantasy-football comedy The League, but the comedian—who spent his teen years playing in bands around his hometown of Montreal—also makes (slightly) more serious music under the moniker of Wolfie’s Just Fine. Last week, Lajoie released a video for the track “A New Beginning,” which takes a wistful (and very specific) look at one of the more brutal kills in the mean-spirited Friday The 13th: A New Beginning.
The video (and song) will remind many a thirtysomething of witnessing their first Friday The 13th movie, probably at some kid’s house where the parents were never home. It’s surprising that Lajoie—being Canadian—didn’t see one of his crushes brutally stabbed to death in Funeral Home or My Bloody Valentine, as 35 would make him the exact right age to catch multiple viewings of A New Beginning on Showtime throughout 1986. The video features three kids that are way too young to be watching the fifth entry in the Friday The 13th saga, obviously without parental guidance as any parent worth their salt would have recommended Part III or The Final Chapter. The young Lajoie becomes quite smitten with actress Debi Sue Voorhees (no relation) as Tina McCarthy, a patient at the Pinehurst Youth Development Center, who steals away with her boyfriend Eddie Kelso (John Robert Dixon) for a romp on Ethel Hubbard’s property. Much like his idol, Jason Voorhees, Roy the ambulance driver doesn’t take kindly to teenagers involved in coitus in his woods, and brutally gouges out Tina’s eyes with a pair of hedge shears and tightens a leather strap around Eddie, crushing his skull.
The clip brings back a certain sense of nostalgia, perfectly capturing those moments where you’re kind of titillated at the sex scene, but still kind of thinking sex is icky, and also terrified about the prospect of Jason coming for you next, particularly on your walk home that night. The sort-of murder ballad touches on themes of lost innocence through sex and violence and is clever without being silly, containing a memorable hook of “It’s Jason.” (“It’s Roy the ambulance driver” wouldn’t carry the same weight.) The makers of the video have done their research, using a hockey mask with blue markings instead of the usual red and practically doing a shot for shot remake of the kill scene from the original film.
Lajoie’s album I Remembered But Then I Forgot is a fine collection of neo-folk, using the echoey production and acoustic guitars that recall the alt-country movement of the late ’90s. While Lajoie explains that there’s never been much of a difference between doing comedy and “serious” music, he admits on his website that he’d “spent so long using music to satirize pop culture or comment on the absurdities of every day life, that I couldn’t really remember who I was when I wasn’t making fun of shit.” There are at least two other movie-oriented tracks on the record based on “the Pigeon Lady” in Home Alone 2: Lost In New York and “Todd & Janelle,” a slice of mid-tempo country pop based on John Conner’s foster parents (and a dog who was not named Wolfie) in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
I Remembered But Then I Forgot is available on iTunes.