Chicken of the Trees

How one song became an album

The story behind the record.

This started because I wanted to write one funny song called Chicken of the Trees. I had lived around South Florida iguanas for years, including two enormous residents behind one of my homes, babies scattering across the metal rain guards, giant iguanas along the canals and roads, and enough firsthand encounters to know Florida had already handed me plenty of material. Then I opened my laptop and started researching. That was the mistake. Every search led to another true story that was more ridiculous than the last: iguanas in toilets, iguanas knocking out power, iguanas falling out of trees when it gets cold, iguanas waking up inside heated vehicles, guided iguana-hunting vacations, iguana tacos, an official warning not to put iguana in ceviche, iguana pizza, thousands of cold-stunned iguanas collected in one Florida operation, and somehow, after all the warfare, an iguana swimming miles offshore. One song became two. Two became a list. The list became a double album. Chicken of the Trees is what happened when I went looking for enough true Florida iguana stories to write a song and discovered that Florida would not fit in one song. The unbelievable parts are the true parts. The comedy comes from what actually happened, what I personally lived through, what agencies and reporters documented, and the uniquely Florida question hanging over the whole thing: after twenty-one songs, which species was really behaving more ridiculously?