February 26, 2008

[EmbersOfAutumn]

Good Morning all

Nice overcast morning down here in Macclenny, Florida. I've always been a fan of overcast, as it keeps the direct sunlight off and can even provide a breeze, keeping the temperatures down to a bearable amount (yes, even in February--this season has been unusually warm). Finished laying down the bass and piano tracks for this week's songfight this morning.

QotD: How were you initially inspired to write the SongFight! song you did last/are now writing?

There's an Ataris song that mentions all the things he did as a kid with his friends, one line including 'skipping school and going to the arcade, hanging out and playing galaga all day'. I kind of based my lyrics around a similar line of thought. The music, on the other hand, was influenced by a Jack's Mannequin CD I've been listening to lately.

[Hoblit]

drc: ahhh, slow day at work (finally) and I'm snacking on fried chicken. (fried up a batch on Sunday night)

QOTD: That last song I did for songfight was under Joblito and it was for the title My Darling Ruin. I've been listening to a lot of Against Me! and I'm so sick of my own boring situations. While its nice to be sitting in an office again making more money... I start to realize how I've really got nothing and even less motivation. That inspired me to essentially bitch about it in the song. Hey, you asked.

[jimtyrrell]

Roll Call: I'm working today. I was going to drive to Portsmouth after work to deliver my RPM CD, but it's snowing, and I'm told it's gonna get pretty bad. So it looks like I'll be mailing it in again this year. Grr.

Also: The porn spammers have started replying to existing threads here, making this forum treacherous at work. Heads up.

QotD: My last two entries have been drinking songs for the RPM project.

[king_arthur]

My last entry was for "They Control the Weather," and as I recall, the thing that got me going was the image of the casino bosses pumping oxygen into the casinos so that people would continue gambling longer. In the song, that wound up as pumping oxygen into the rooms so you couldn't go to sleep and went back DOWN to the tables. Our family actually lived in Las Vegas when Howard Hughes was in hiding at the Frontier.

Most of my SF songs, this one included, start out with me pondering the title and looking for an "approach" to it, and then a lot of the specific lyrics and music work themselves out while I'm out walking the dogs in the early morning. The sorta gentle Mexican / Carribean feel of the music has to do with Las Vegas being in the southwest, along with me wanting to sound like Jimmy Buffet any chance I get...

The TV ads about "What happens in Vegas... stays in Vegas" inspired the second half of the chorus.

One of the things I usually work on a lot with a song is the order things come, the order that information is presented to the listener, and I went back and forth with this one on whether the "oxygen in the room" (the connection to "weather") verse needed to come first, and I finally decided that, no, it worked better to set it off by itself between choruses, and start out the song with the Howard Huges story and the Tupac Shakir story. I also counted on the listener figuring out that "McCarran" was the name of the airport, but using the name added a little extra local color...

Charles (KA)

[fluffy]

My most recent one was "and counting," and I was inspired by the fact it was the 500th title so I thought I would do something based on the number 500. People were not as interested in listening to a factorial sequence rendered in percussion as I was.

I also did get some inspiration for "Half Empty/Half Full" but I couldn't manage to flesh it out to a whole song. ("I like to think it's at the halfway point / you like to think of it as half-empty" and a few variations thereof were all I could come up with, lyric-wise.) Also I have some ideas pinging around in my head for "At The Arcade" (perhaps about two people who project their emotions onto each others' DDR avatars and fall in love, only to realize they are fundamentally incompatible in real life) but nothing's really congealing.

[Paco Del Stinko]

Hmm...not snowing down here. But then again, I'm at like 5 feet above sea level. Jim, I was thinking that if your FAWM album was the one that was all drinking songs you could've had the last song be called "Half Pint". Lame, I know.

QOTD - I have a goofy melody that came to me while washing dishes that I'm hoping to use this week.

Last night I fixed my old wah pedal that's been out of commission for five or six years. I've had this pedal longer than almost all of my guitars and am delighted at such a simple thing as its return to the arsenal. (doesn't take much, I guess) I've had three in the meantime, and of those the best is a Bud-Wah. The old one is a pre-Dunlop Cry Baby and is just wet and skanky sounding. Long live the wah!

[Rabid Garfunkel]

QOTD: Procrastination on other projects. (Latest GOM... ever ...for me, anyway) It's in the same vein as the style I'm working in for the GOM (orchestral) and doesn't really fit any of the current titles, though the front page was up on the screen when I fired up the synthesizer and started making soothing noises. Is that the furthest edge of "inspired by" or what?

And now there's motion and mood scribbled out on a page. And other scoring going on as a background process that's running in my head.

Dunno how it'd tie in with Ark of Philadelphia, being more a vaguely depressing lullaby than anything else at this point. (Mrs. Rabid found it comforting enough to fall asleep to, which says what exactly? Heh.) But it may be the distraction needed to kick everything else back into high gear.

Hmmm.

[Billy's Little Trip]

QOTD: My last song was Still Waiting, for Purple Reign. I couldn't get the thought out of my head of a girl saving her virginity until she was married. I built it from there.

Nice sunny day here, around 85 degrees. The waves were crazy yesterday. I ended up breaking my board and hurting myself, lol. But it was a blast while it lasted.

[HeuristicsInc]

The last one I really wrote the lyrics for was Ottoman (MSP). The idea came from wanting to combine the furniture ottoman with the Ottoman Empire, and coming up with a group of ottomans attacking various other furniture factions to take over the whole house. After that Niv added the chorus.
-bill

[sausage boy]

The last song I wrote for SongFight proper was Baby, Be Quiet, which just sort of came to me. I supposed the amount of Dead Rising I had been playing contributed somehow, but that is debatable. Just because I made explicit reference to it in the song means nothing. Nothing!

After that, we are mainly looking at Purple Reign songs (mostly about doing the nasty in some way) and FAWM songs (all about HL2). The Purple Reign songs are mostly inspired by my renewed want to just shout at people, and the HL2 ones are inspired by the events of HL2. WHY I decided to do 14 songs about HL2, I have no idea. Possibly, it is because I'm a giant fucking nerd.

[jack]

i think it was the mescaline.