I've got a soft spot for high-concept country novelty weepers. The more famous A side of this single, "Hello This Is Joannie (The Telephone Answering Machine Song)," is kind of a high-water mark for the genre, but it's also a sore spot in our household given the title character's name (basically identical to my wife's) and, well, she dies driving drunk and then the narrator keeps calling her answering machine to hear her voice! Morbid!
So this one, then. A song about "the makers of the softest tissue paper to ever wipe a teardrop from your eye," personally endorsed by the narrator, as they are gentle and strong enough to handle the copious tears brought on by "she left me over some dumb thing that I said."*
More importantly, the version that was floating around on YouChoob for years has a skip in a really key part of the ludicrous narrative, so now that I'm hearing it without that particular skip, it makes me almost uneasy - wait, that's the spot where my shoulders are supposed to tense up - why am I not tense?
*I really like how he condenses all of the conflict to one concise sentence - let's focus on the tears and the off-brand Kleenex instead.
