The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Generic wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 05, 2020 3:14 pm

You'll get no argument from me on that, Frank. I actually wrote that and then erased it... Most of them just aren't very good! I'd say two or three of these are all time classics (jury's still out on Adele, but I think hers may stand the test of time), and the rest range from actively awful to just okay. I figured we wouldn't want to model that part of it.

Yeah, it's almost like someone said here's a title and your challenge is "Bond theme" and then they had to write it in a week. That's how bad they are!

Lunkhead wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 05, 2020 3:00 pm

frank, as the only actual composer in the field (as far as I know) you ought to be able to own this challenge.

Oh I will, Sam. I will.

MANY WILL RANK ME HIGH AND SOME WILL RANK ME VERY LOW!

And that is how I will OWN IT!

Generic wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 05, 2020 8:00 am

Some running throughlines I observed...

• Many of them focus on the lead vocal performance, including a difficult melody with lots of space for the vocalist to belt.

Oh shit

furrypedro wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 05, 2020 3:39 am

Wikipedia, my friend. Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Blanche_(novel)

Perhaps the only thing worse than reading a bad Bond novel...

I don't even have lyrics this week. And I know it's not going to happen tonight or Sunday.

OK - just sent in my first Nur Ein shadow. in my Carte Blanche Bond movie the villain is Bond's ex lover/ex spy (they worked together) so that's what's going on in the lyrics. she's a good spy gone bad. or something like that.

Bravo New Ugly!!!
That was a great episode, many laughs!
good to have you back!

In.

(Hail Satan.)

I'm in with a shadow.

This song is about the first time I saw a James Bond movie, which was A View to a Kill; it is also about other events that occurred around the same time. All of this true, by the way.

Cavedwellers are in!

I LOVED this challenge!
That was so much fun!

I'm running around a bit at the moment so in lieu of a bunch of reply emails, here's who I've got so far:

See-Man-Ski
The Lowest Bitter
Vom Vorton
The Serviettes
Nick Soma
Hot Pink Halo
Lichen Throat
Cavedwellers
Balance Lost

Mine is not sent yet. I was ahead of schedule earlier in the week, but I'm cutting this one down to the wire again. Eesh.

I just sent my shadow in again since it wasn't on the list of received entries

Niveous wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 07, 2020 6:26 pm

I'm running around a bit at the moment so in lieu of a bunch of reply emails, here's who I've got so far:

See-Man-Ski
The Lowest Bitter
Vom Vorton
The Serviettes
Nick Soma
Hot Pink Halo
Lichen Throat
Cavedwellers
Balance Lost

FBF
Third Cat
Micah
Mandibles

Hey, if someone wants to make me a very James Bondy piece of cover art, it would be greatly appreciated.

I think Vom already has one

I did my first shadow. It's... a song.

I submitted with only eleven minutes to spare... Then couldn't help making one last tweak and sent it in with only ONE minute to spare.

NUR EIN!!!!

I sent in the Moss Palace song 18 minutes ago. (So far no confirmation email.)

Mandibles are in, featuring brass from a couple of friends I've made along my travels. Bond movies generally have 3 key players: Bond, the villain, and the femme fatale. In our hypothetical movie, however, there is no villain, because the femme fatale plays both roles. She's Bond's US equivalent- a highly trained operative who rose up the ranks and now is sent on missions to complete however she sees fit with near impunity. This time, her target is Bond himself, to extract critical evidence from MI6. Bond knows there's a spy after the info, he just doesn't realize it'e the charming yankee he met on holiday...
In addition to bringing in brass players to play on it, I tried playing around with vocal distortion for this song. I like what I got on the verse, but the chorus distortion was so poor, I ended up removing it. Definitely something I will want to try more in the future!

Maybe contrary to a lot of folks I actually get a kick out of or even genuinely like a lot of the Bond themes. I love so many of the "classic"/60s/70s themes if only for the kitsch value. "Goldfinger", "Thunderball", "Diamonds Are Forever", "Moonraker" (go Shirley Bassey!!) are definite favorites. A couple from that era I actually think are pretty good, like "You Only Live Twice" (been stuck in my head a lot this week), "The Spy Who Loved Me"/"Nobody Does It Better", and of course "Live and Let Die". Then ... there are the 80s song. Very hit or miss for me, as I struggle a lot with the 80s production sound. I think "A View To A Kill" is the standout. It breaks with a ton of the typical musical signifiers but I think it keeps enough of them (like the nearly nonsensical lyrics) and I think stands well on its own. Then we get to the "modern" songs. The 90s stuff is mostly forgettable then the 2000s start off with by far, by so so far, the absolute worst steaming pile, Madonna's "Die Another Day". Ughghghghghg. At one point she just says "Sigmund Freud" for NO F'ING REASON! Also it just sounds so bad. So bad. Maybe it was that song that killed the Pierce Brosnan Bond run?! Then come another couple songs I actually think are just good songs, Chris Cornell's "You Know My Name" (just great) and Jack White and Alicia Keys' "Another Way To Die" (really great groove, although, not really super memorable otherwise). The last few sort of went back to the old days with super dramatic over the top ballads, although without the retro/kitsch factor they don't do a lot for me.

Anyway, I had fun at least diving into all those.

The judges might find it informative to compare the average word count of famous "Bond themes" to the word count of those novellas posted to the lyrics thread.

"Liner Notes" on my track - I imagined my lyrics as being from the perspective of a Bond villain. I could picture it as sort of a monologue near the end of the movie, when the criminal mastermind has captured Bond in his secret lair and is explaining his evil philosophy near the climax of the film.

Late in the songwriting process, I discovered that there is an actual Bond novel called Carte Blanche. I had already written my lyrics, but there was one couplet I didn't care for, so I scrapped it and tried to allude to that novel's villain in the lyrics that would replace it. According to Wikipedia, the main villain* of Carte Blanche is Severan Hydt, a waste disposal magnate who "has an intense fascination with death, which is strongly implied to be a sexual fetish." So with that in mind, the lines "Our moment of reckoning / Thanatos beckoning" came about. Thanatos is one of the Greek gods of death. (Side note: The Marvel villain Thanos, whose name clearly came from Thanatos, also has a fascination with death that is implied to be sexual in nature; in fact he lusts after a personification of Death).

I also checked the James Bond fan wiki for more information about Severn Hydt, and found that he chose to name himself after Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde, because he believes in the duality of man and embracing both sides of himself, the "good" and the "evil." There are some lyrics in my song that would fit this characterization, but I must admit that they are coincidental... Or at least a byproduct of the fact that there are certain patterns to the philosophies of James Bond bad guys.

*There is a late novel twist where the "Bond Girl" is actually the mastermind of the whole plot, but for most of the novel, the reader is to assume that Hydt is the primary baddie.