Jan Cornall
Jan Cornall Jan Cornall is a writer and singer based in Sydney. She is best known for her 80s cabaret musical, Failing In Love Again with pianist Elizabeth Drake which toured Australia and was revived for Mardi Gras in 2020. Jan also mentors writers and leads writer’s retreats in international locations.
“I don’t remember the exact moment I wrote this song. It must have been some time in 1975. After several months travelling with my buddy Ruth Maddison in Mexico and the USA in ’74, I ended up in Eugene, Oregon, planting trees. Ruth had gone home to Oz and I followed a lead given by some women we’d met at a women’s festival. In Eugene (the counterculture capital of the world) I found the collective run outfit called the Hoedads who employed anyone with a willingness to scamper across ridiculously steep log strewn slopes in the pouring rain…The sexual revolution was in full swing, the women’s movement was taking off, queer and left politics were leading the anti-couple, anti-monogamy, anti-capitalism, anti-everything charge into a redefinition of the romantic love myth. Against that backdrop this song was born. I used to sing it with three chords on a guitar, as I did for my try out for the all girl latin jazz band Baba Yaga. They were looking for a drummer and I’d just started learning the conga drums. They took me on in good faith that I would improve and my songs added a novel touch. We recorded the original version on our album Baba Yaga“
Photo credit: Sally Colechi
Listen to Songs By Jan Cornall
Monogamy Schbedogamy
The song selected for the songbook is Monogamy Shbedogamy. Click below to hear the performance by Jan Cornall accompanied by Elizabeth Drake.
Song Lyrics
If you feel suffocated and heavied out
With your one forever lover cannot work it out
Then why don’t you go on a polygamous bout
By taking four or five or six other friends out? And sing
Monogamy schbedogamy, do you mind if I bring a friend with me?
Two is nice, but it’s healthier with three
Monogamy schbedogamy!
Some people used to roam around in gangs of three
Committed to the cause of anti-monogamy
And when a happy couple anywhere they’d see
They began to sing ‘monogamy schbedogamy’, And sing
Monogamy schbedogamy, do you mind if I bring a friend with me?
Two is nice, but it’s healthier with three
Monogamy schbedogamy!
Oh, one dear friend came to me, and said
‘Would you like to come to bed with me?
I said ‘Ooh, la, la, but before we go too far
Let me tell you where my sexual politics are’. And sang
Monogamy schbedogamy, do you mind if I bring a friend with me?
Two is nice, but it’s healthier with three
Monogamy schbedogamy!
Oh, there’s monogamy polygamy and bigamy,
Security and purity and chastity,
The strangest thing about these words is that I see
They were all made up by some old man and not by me! So sing
Monogamy schbedogamy, do you mind if I bring a friend with me?
Two is nice, but it’s healthier with three
Monogamy schbedogamy!
Well, if you think this anti-idea is a little unreal
I won’t make excuses, it’s just that I feel
Some alternative is needed to love and broken heart
If the price of love is pain, then I think I’ll stick to art! And sing
Monogamy schbedogamy, do you mind if I bring a friend with me?
Two is nice, but it’s healthier with three
Monogamy schbedogamy!
The CD has fourteen original songs from the cult hit 80s musical with Jan Cornall and Elizabeth Drake: Idiosyncracies, Spilt Guilt, Limping For Sympathy, Better Than Het,The Vibrator Song and many more!