My favorite country song. Yes, my favorite country song. It is by a man named Michael Stanton. It is a cover of the song “Skin” by Oingo Boingo. This song is deeply strange (lyrics), and sounds especially weird sung by a neo-tradionalist Country singer. I would love to hear more country songs like this.
I am sharing this with you because you would never come across this song. It is the final track at the end of Danny Elfman’s score to the Clive Barker film, Nightbreed (1990). The song can be heard in the film playing on the radio when Sheryl Ann is waiting in the car outside Midian, just before the psychiatrist arrives. The song was released on the film’s cassette soundtrack. I’m thinking that Danny Elfman (formerly of Oingo Boingo) had wanted “Skin” covered by a country artist for years, but he had to wait through ten years of making soundtracks for Tim Burton films before one came along where he could sneak the cover of “Skin” into the budget.
Please take a listen. Here is “Country Skin” by Michael Stanton. And here, for comparison is the non-country original “Skin” by Oingo Boingo. And here is El*Argento’s beautiful new skin for winamp. What is hiding underneath this skin? The boring old winamp skin. If you use windows and winamp, you can download this skin and make your winamp look more like a late 1990s Warp label album cover here.
“Hiding Underneath the Skin” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.
It does appear in the movie. It’s the song playing on the radio when Sheryl Ann is waiting in the car outside Midian, just before the psychiatrist arrives. Just the 1st 4 lines, but enough that I recognized it while I was re-watching Nightbreed just now.
Thank you, Anonymous 🙂