Nur Ein XV Round Five "North Beach Vampires"

[Niveous]

5th round is up. Still got gas in the tank?

Submit an original song by June 14th at 11:59 PM (EDT) that fits the following criteria

Title: North Beach Vampires
Challenge: Include an a cappella section

Examples:
The Beach Boys, "I Can Hear Music"
Doobie Brothers, "Black Water"
Queen, "The Prophet's Song"
The Zombies, "The Way I Feel Inside"
Electric Light Orchestra, "Wild West Hero"

Send your MP3 to nurein.sidefight@gmail.com

Good luck!

[sailingmagpie]

Can I just check, is this title some kind of cultural reference not immediately obvious to non-Americans or is it just a random collection of words? I've had a look on the interwebs but can't see anything.

[vowlvom]

It is not a cultural reference. Until you turn it into one! Using songwriting magic! If you like!!!

[frankie big face]

Can I just check, is this title some kind of cultural reference not immediately obvious to non-Americans or is it just a random collection of words? I've had a look on the interwebs but can't see anything.

Nope, we’re just as clueless as you.

[sailingmagpie]

Haha, thought I'd check before I plodded off on some nonsensical tangent!

[crumpart]

I saw the title, logged onto Facebook, saw the first thing a friend had posted and went HELL YES THERE IS MY SONG. For the first time so far in this whole thing, I actually started recording on announcement day.

[frankie big face]

Haha, thought I'd check before I plodded off on some nonsensical tangent!

Some Nonsensical Tangent is next week’s title.

[sailingmagpie]

Haha, thought I'd check before I plodded off on some nonsensical tangent!

Some Nonsensical Tangent is next week’s title.

I'm in.

Title: Some Nonsensical Tangent
Challenge: Use no chords. Or melodies. Or instruments. Or vocals.

[ujnhunter]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Boys

[BoffoYux]

Haha, thought I'd check before I plodded off on some nonsensical tangent!

Some Nonsensical Tangent is next week’s title.

Title: Some Nonsensical Tangent
Challenge: Use no chords. Or melodies. Or instruments. Or vocals.

Some Nonsensical Tangent is my DEVO/They Might Be Giants coverband.

[Niveous]

Some Nonsensical Tangent is next week’s title.

Title: Some Nonsensical Tangent
Challenge: Use no chords. Or melodies. Or instruments. Or vocals.

Some Nonsensical Tangent is my DEVO/They Might Be Giants coverband.

Do they do both bands songs OR is it all mashups like "Mongoloid in your Soul" and "Uncontrollable Worm"?

[JonPorobil]

Micah Sommersmith - Reviewing the lyrics in writing, I can see that they're extensively annotated, and... yeah, I'm not reading all that. I'm not above using a link to one obscure word when I transcribe my lyrics, but what you did was... a lot, dude.

I've just completed and posted my "North Beach Vampires" lyrics, and, well uh... oops.

To quote the the patron saint of Song Fight, MC Frontalot... "My least favorite thing is a hypocrite, but I'll be one."

[mo]

I feel like I should tell embarrassing stories about Damian every time he gets referred to on Songfight anymore

[crumpart]

Gizo has gently pointed out that I automatically translated “North Beach Vampires“ to “North Shore Vampires” in my head. This is because I’m very Australian and permanently have this line from our Holy Teenage Girl Bible, Looking For Alibrandi in my head:

"the wogs marry the wogs, the westies marry the westies and the north shore marry the north shore!"

(Note: yes, that there quote contains a racist slur. It’s a book about race and the person saying it was of the ethnicity it refers to and was using it in context.)

Now, my song is not about Looking For Aibrandi, but it is specifically about a well known North Shore Vampire. A shore’s a beach, right?

[iVeg]

Got part recorded, then infinite interruptions struck. I really need to find a way to speed up my process.

[JonPorobil]

I've been having issues with my computer crashing and my DAW either taking a long time to load or not loading at all.

My song isn't finished yet, but it was in a "good enough" state that I decided to bounce it down, run some quick mastering over it, and email that to Niveous. Hopefully I'll be able to finish the rest of the mix without any further problems and submit a revised version before the deadline, but even if worse comes to worst, I'll still at least have SOMETHING in this round.

This is only my second time in Round 5. Last time I made it this far, the judges ranked me 8th place out of 8. So, no matter what happens now, I've at least tied my best-ever Nur Ein showing. Good luck to everyone!

NUR EIN!!!!!

[JonPorobil]

Liner notes, for those judges and other listeners who care about such things...

But hidden behind a tag for those who don't care about such things...

SPOILER_SHOW

One of the examples of the challenge was a Beach Boys song, and the title contains the word "Beach," so I went for the obvious approach, musically, and did a pastiche of the Beach Boys, and tried not to overthink it. Since the title also contains the word "Vampires," which is an image quite incongruous with the mood I associate with the beach, I chose to lean into that incongruity and made it a song about some lovable monsters... or rather, comparing myself and a non-specific group of a million people to these lovable monsters. Each monster is described either looking silly, doing something silly, acting incongruously with their myth, or is seen in a place where they don't belong.

I also leaned heavily on prosodic techniques like assonance and alliteration to reach for silly images that still felt good to sing. So, for instance, Nosferatu with a pompadour, a sea creature at a ski lodge, a kraken on the wing of a plane, cadejos skipping rope, and of course... Technicolor Chupacabras. (I hope Grumpy Mike will be pleased to note that, at long last, when the Chupacabra appears in my lyrics, it's actually a Chupacabra.) Using these silly images definitely pushed the song's genre beyond "Beach Boys pastiche" and into "60s novelty single" territory, so I did a silly vampire voice at the very beginning to prime the expectation for silliness right off the bat. One person I showed this to advised against this intro, but I'm trusting my instincts and leaving it in.

There are several words and phrases in my lyrics which I annotated over on [urlhttps://songfight.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11820]Ye Olde Lyric Archive[/url] with hyperlinks. I'm not sure any of these are strictly necessary to understanding the idea of the song, but if you were curious what a cadejo is, or Baba Yaga, or perhaps wondered about that one thing being shouted at the end, you can find it there. I'm aware that many listeners (and at least one judge) wants the song to stand on its own and chooses not to read along with the lyrics. I totally understand that - it was my intention for the song to bop regardless of whether you've done the homework, and I hope that comes through.

Musically, the verses start and stop a bit, which I intended to be musically symbolic of a monster's shambling gait. There's a harmonica solo in the middle. I thought a saxophone would have been better, but I didn't like the sound of any of my VSTs, so stuck with the acoustic instrument. I actually bought a new harmonica specifically for this song, because my old "A" harmonica was cheap and had some bent-out reeds.

I think that's all I have to say this time around. I mean, it's not a manifesto; it's a silly little surf-rock dance song about movie monsters. Just dance and have fun! AWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

Er... I mean, NUR EIN!!!!!

[lichenthroat]

I'm in with a shadow entry. This was, at long last, my attempt to write a goth song. It didn't come out quite as gothy as I had hoped, but I think I like it. The lyrics are just silly commentary on women's fashion trends; when I lived in Miami in the late 1990s, it was apparently fashionable for women to tie their hair back as tight as possible and wear a particular style of very dark, strangely cut, uncomfortable-looking jeans, even when it was 95 degrees and everyone sensible was wearing shorts. In reality, I don't think that they never came out during the day, but there did seem to more of them at night. But they probably weren't real vampires.

[crumpart]

I hope everyone likes mouth sounds.

[Niveous]

I hope everyone likes mouth sounds.

Since I'm sitting around watching Youtube videos on Con Langs, I am all about the mouth sounds right now.

[truth]

Cavedwellers have written a little love letter to the beats and freaks of an Italian neighborhood in the shadows of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, where poets, pranksters and pigeons left their mark over the years.

Locations:
Nepenthe (Restaurant in Big Sur)
The Stinking Rose (touristy restaurant)
Caffe Trieste (coffeehouse)
City Lights (bookstore)
Vesuvio (bar)

Dramatis personae:
Henry Miller
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsburg
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Neal Cassady
Francis Ford Coppola
Mario Puzo (in spirit)
“Me”

Special thanks to Paul Lorigan, who played the baritone saxophone.

[Cybronica]

You know how when you haven’t properly gone outside for a really long time (Like months) and you lose any glimpse of a tan you might have had and you joke about Being a vampire because you haven’t seen the sun in so long? Also you know actual vampires? Yeah, that’s what Mandibles’ song is about.