You Ain't No Picasso had a pretty smart idea when they enlisted Clem Snide frontman Eef Barzelay to help them out with a contest. Entrants in the contest offered up a personal story, and then Barzelay chose one and wrote a song about it. In the end, the winner was Garret Wiwcharuk who submitted a story about an Australian girl he's been talking to. Nothing like long distance romance to get the creative juices flowing.

The song Barzelay came up with, "The Great Barrier Reef," is, hopefully, a fictional piece based on Wiwcharuk's tale that, like so many of Barzelay's songs, lives in heartache and memory. But the country ballad is hardly soft. In fact, Barzelay gets downright bawdy in this track, starting right off the bat with some blush-worthy sex talk. But the theramin-like warble he achieves with his voice between verses fills out the threadbare song nicely. And in the end, the sexual provocation Barzelay plays with is just another one of his clunky, off-putting paths into something that ends up being heartfelt and quite beautiful. So if the opening lines make you cringe (because they sound forced, not because they might be, you know, inappropriate), just try pushing past them and you'll probably find yourself enjoying this touching ballad. That is, until he utters those lines again. And again. "The Great Barrier Reef" is exclusively available for download here.

In other Barzelay news, Clem Snide's new album, Hungry Bird, is now available, and the band is set to embark on a reunion tour starting Mar. 11 in Atlanta. So get ready to get lonely in a room full of people.