“Short Skirt / Long Jacket” brought the funk to Cake‘s fourth album Comfort Eagle in 2001. The song peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, and the music from “Short Skirt / Long Jacket” was used as the opening theme song for the NBC spy comedy Chuck, which aired for five seasons from 2007 through 2012.
Videos by American Songwriter
Written solely by McCrae, on its surface, the lyrics revolve around what a guy wants in a girl—everything from a short skirt, shoes that cut, and eyes that burn like cigarettes.
I want a girl with a mind like a diamond
I want a girl who knows what’s best
I want a girl with shoes that cut
And eyes that burn like cigarettes
I want a girl with the right allocations
Who is fast, and thorough, and sharp as a tack
She’s playing with her jewelry
She’s putting up her hair
She’s touring the facility
And picking up slack
I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket
“I think it was inspired by seeing somebody with those two oppositional fashion gestures,” said Cake vocalist John McCrea of the song. “And that’s sort of what the song is about—directly oppositional forces housed within the same mechanism or personage. I saw this woman as trying to arrive at balance, the skirt going up and the jacket going down.”
“Strange” Human Behavior
Though McCrae said the song was never written about his ideal woman. “It’s really just about prosperity and depression and what happens to the human mating ritual when you have population booms and then things start to lag in every way,” said McCrae. “So I was not really writing about a woman in a short skirt, long jacket as much I was writing about humans and how strange our behavior is.”
Cake trumpeter Vincent DiFiore added, “It doesn’t really seem anyone ever gets what they really want, and life ends up being not about what you end up obtaining, but about the yearning and longing. I think it’s a snapshot of that moment of feeling which ends up being your whole life anyway.”
Vibraslap
To capture the rattling accents throughout the track, the band used a vibraslap to segue between chorus and verse. The percussive instrument features a U-shaped wire connecting a wooden ball to a hollow wood box with metal pins inside. To play, the percussionist holds the metal wire in one hand while striking the ball to achieve the rattling sound.
The vibraslap can also be heard on Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” the intro of Aerosmith‘s “Sweet Emotion,” and Jimi Hendrix‘s classic 1968 cover of “All Along the Watchtower.
The Video
Filmed in Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico City, the unconventional music video for “Short Skirt / Long Jacket” featured footage of different people listening to the song on headphones and their reactions.
“So it’s a kinda supergirl that some feminists would approve of or something,” says one older man with a white beard. “I just paid eighty thousand dollars to divorce my wife,” said another guy with tattoos. “If she was a little more like this broad in this song I think I might have stayed with her.” A girl listening to the song added, “I really don’t like these lyrics. They’re really awful.”
“This video idea came about as a desperate attempt on my part to not do a music video, but that doesn’t mean I think music videos are inherently wrong,” said McCrae of the video. “I just didn’t want to do a video with four white guys lip-synching in an urban decay setting.”
Photo: John Shearer / Getty
