God Told Me To (song)

"God Told Me To" is the first single from Australian songwriter Paul Kelly's album Stolen Apples.

Contents

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• References

The song deals with a fictional character called John Johanna, on trial for murder. To explain his actions, John defends himself by saying that God told him to do this. The song continues Paul Kelly's affair with using biblical imagery in his songs.

In an interview Kelly explains

The way for me into a song often is to imagine someone speaking. Sometimes that's the way the song starts, once you get the voice of that character. God Told Me To is an angry song, imagining a character that's kinda crazy and then writing in that voice. He sees evil and needs to wipe it out. And that's a form of acting, writing that way.

Kelly explains that he borrowed the opening line - "My name is John Johanna" - from American folk antiquity but points out that John is also the name of the author of the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptic last book of the New Testament.

The last verse of the song is pretty much directly from Revelation, which is sort of the text of fundamental Christianity. George Bush, the religious right in America, they're all over it. But fundamentalist Islam is the same craziness.