Nature & Animals Quote by Brian Setzer

Setzer’s brag here is the kind musicians rarely allow themselves: not “I meant to revolutionize guitar,” but “I have no idea why that worked, and everyone keeps asking anyway.” That shrug is doing a lot of cultural labor. “Stray Cat Strut” is rockabilly revival music built on swagger and simplicity, the kind of song that’s supposed to feel inevitable. Then he undercuts the myth with a nerdy breadcrumb: “that little diminished run on the C.” A tiny, slightly “wrong” harmonic move becomes the thing listeners fetishize, proof that style often hinges on a micro-decision you make in passing.

The subtext is that virtuosity isn’t the point; accident is. “My brain is wired backwards” reads like self-deprecation, but it’s also a claim of authorship. He’s framing the lick as an instinctive deviation from the expected vocabulary, the musical equivalent of a smirk in the middle of a tough-guy pose. Diminished runs are tension machines: they add a brief flash of danger, a cartoonish noir shadow. In the context of Setzer’s clean, percussive Gretsch tone and retro aesthetic, that moment of harmonic skew becomes the wink that keeps the throwback from turning into cosplay.

And the line “I don’t know what possessed me” quietly rejects the over-intellectualization fans crave. People want the recipe; Setzer offers something closer to haunting: sometimes the most iconic part of a song is the part the artist can’t fully account for, because it came from feel, not plan. That’s also why the question never dies. The lick is teachable; the instinct that placed it there isn’t.