All right, now that the judging is over, I'd like to share a few details about my song.
First of all, a couple of reviews broached this (and I expected it to be a dealbreaker, to be honest—I'm surprised I didn't get cut)... No, there's no existing connection between
Futurama and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." My brain made that connection, and I spent most of the challenge time frustrated at myself for coming up with this idea that was simultaneously kind of perfect but also so tenuously-connected that it was likely to confuse some listeners.
Second—I tried to hold myself to some rules, to demonstrate the helplessness and futility of Kif's situation. He's such a passive character: He hasall this barely-veiled frustration and disgust, but none of the initiative to achieve the things he wants, so the verse chord progression barely moves. It hangs on the tonic (A), briefly ventures into the subdominant (D), but goes back to the tonic in one measure. The I-IV progression itself is pretty weak motion, too, so even that one step isn't really enough to get anywhere. I had a second chord progression for the B-section, but midway through the song I realized it wasn't working with my melody, so I replaced it with the progression from the
Futurama theme song. Nobody seems to have noticed that, or perhaps everyone thought it was so obvious it didn't need comment. Art is frustrating sometimes!
The other rule I stuck to was that, in the main part of the song (outside of the "When I'm alone..." bridge), Kif never uses the first person active voice. Things happen
to him, but he's never the one
doing them. It wasn't "I call Amy," it was "Amy answering her phone." It wasn't "I breathe into the line," but rather "My labored breathing fills the call." Then, most of the lines in the bridge were in the first person, emphasizing Kif's fantasy of self-actualization. Back in the "real world," the closing lines have him taking a little baby step in that direction by "I'll have to become more than..."
I used a few tricks to emphasize the contrast between the two sections, which really were basically two distinct songs. The guitar and vocals are performed and miked differently. For the verses, I finger-picked with the microphone very close up pointed at the sound hole. For the bridge I strummed loudly from about two feet away, microphone pointed at the 12th fret, and I double-tracked the performance for stereo widening. For the verses, I performed the vocals while sitting in my office chair, literally slouched over the microphone, at a distance of about 3 inches. For the bridge, I turned the mic volume way down, stood up about 8 inches away from the mic, and belted as much as I could. I used an imager to "narrow" the stereo field of the solo sections, to make them feel less spacious, and I used the same imager to widen out the bridge. And of course, the bridge also contains a bass, piano, drums, background vocals, and four extra layers of guitar.
I thought for sure I was getting cut. I'm pretty sure I would have been, if not for Dave Leigh, so thanks, Dave!
) I think it's a strong round and I need to listen a few more times to wrap my head around the whole thing. The challenge was my favorite of any of the nur ein/spin tunes so far. I'm going to use it in the future.
.