Actor and musician Michael Shannon performed the first song he ever wrote during an appearance Thursday on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Long before becoming a founding member of the indie rock band Corporal, Shannon recalled being in his first band at age 15, The Jehovah’s Suspects. The group, he said, mainly played in front of “10 to 15 teenagers with Dixie cups filled with some incorrect amount of alcohol and soda pop.”
The band performed covers of popular tunes from the likes of Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
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At one point, though, Shannon played his bandmates a song he had written. Its title: “The Armadillo Song.”
The others in the group “were stoked,” Shannon remembered, “because it’s mainly just one chord and it wasn’t too fast, so it wasn’t hard to play.”
And apparently this was still the case after not having played it in “a while,” as Shannon admitted. Because after some prompting by Meyers, he retrieved a conveniently placed acoustic guitar from behind his seat and gave the song its first airtime anywhere.
“I imagined an armadillo in the desert struggling to survive, which is how I very much felt as my 15-year-old self,” Shannon explained. “I could identify with that.”
Although he later realized some inconsistencies between the lyrics and the characteristics of the animal, he did not feel the need to change them.
“When you’re at [Madison Square Garden] playing the song, you don’t want people getting confused,” Shannon joked.
