A couple weeks ago, Steve Perron was sitting on his front porch and thinking about cicadas. A former KMOV producer, he remembered all the various stories the station had run about not letting pets scarf up too many of the insects.
“The fact is that the vast majority of them come up out of the ground [and get eaten],” Perron speculates, explaining how he’s spotted very few live bugs. “I'm not an entomologist — I don't know — but I'm gonna guess that 90 to 95 percent of them are eaten within hours.”
How unlucky for them, he pondered. And if that had been anyone else’s thought, that might be the end of it. But not for Perron.
Instead of letting it go, he wrote a song. That tune, dubbed “Unlucky - The Cicada Song” details the inevitable dark fate of the cicadas emerging from a 13-year nap under the ground, set to a melodic and slightly twangy guitar. It probably doesn’t need to be said that it’s very funny.
“After 13 years they come up for a first look at the sky/They don’t know that most of them are about to die/‘cause the birds and dogs, possums, coons, they’ve been waiting too/Once they start to show up they know just what to do,” he sings, going on to compare the bugs to popcorn, a “cicada smorgasbord” and a cornucopia.
Other highlights of the humorous ditty include the comparison between it being “part of God’s plan” with the cicadas thinking “that’s not intelligent design” and that the baby cicadas being made after all this mating will inevitably be eaten in 13 years.
The song pretty much wrote itself, Perron says. But it was his wife, Debbie Perron, who helped him refine the project, suggesting that the focus should be on the cicadas being unlucky. He thought that was a clever idea, as was her suggestion to remove the bridges, which he only partially took.
“She often offers pretty good criticism and suggestions for my songs, but this time it actually altered the way the song was written,” he says.
The song, recorded by Kenny Lee Hall, and the video, shot by Charles Schmitt, are getting a lot of attention already on Perron’s Youtube, SoundCloud and Instagram.
This isn’t Perron’s first foray into humorous songwriting. If his name sounds familiar, you might be thinking of another one of his viral hits, “The Ballad of Stan Kroenke,” a parody of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song that he wrote in 2016 amid the Rams’ debacle that takes aim at the most hated man in St. Louis.
Perron, who regularly takes to open mics and gigs around town to showcase his singer/songwriter skills, hails from Florissant and now resides in Brentwood. Though he initially opted for the seminary (St. Vincent’s in Cape Girardeau) instead of a local high school, he ended up adjacent to town with college at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and then moved to Chicago for work. (Fun fact, he was at WLS TV when Oprah Winfrey launched her show and played on it as part of a newsroom band dubbed News Emergency.)
Eventually, he and his wife returned for real, and shortly afterward, he picked up his guitar again after a 15 to 20 year break. Slowly, Perron got more and more into songwriting and playing. Now, you can find him around town showing off his chops or playing in the band Live at Five with Emily Beck, a senior producer at KMOV.
“I always describe my life experience as lucky — as opposed to the cicadas,” Perron says.
Hear Perron perform the song live on Saturday, May 11, at 7 p.m. during the Walter's Walk Songwriter's Showcase.
This story has been updated.
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