Monday, December 21, 2009

"Marital Dischord" - Sounds like the 80s threw up.


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On day 2 of my "5 Songs in a Week" project, I made the journey to Jake "Your Tastebuds Can't Repel Flavor of this Magnitude" Frye's place, with a Chicken Mini-Meal from Mickey D's and a six-pack of PBR tallboys in tow. We hadn't had a chance to record since the summer, when the already-classic original trilogy of Buzzsaw tunes was first laid to zeroes and ones.

As a result, we'd had plenty of time to think about what we wanted to do with this song, which I think had us both a little worried. The first three songs came out as fast and as easily as the dramatic reenactments on the show "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" (yes, I just went there), so I for one had some concerns that we'd had too much time to think about what we wanted with this tune.

The groundrules stayed the same: write as much of a song as possible while drinking too much beer and smoking too many cigarrettes, don't listen to your censor, and don't give a damn about whether the song will actually be good or not. The last rule in that series is, I think, the key to the whole project. "Tastebuds" and I both share a certain, um, taste, for bad music so even a crappy song would find a good home with loving parents if it so chose to buzz its way through our amniotic sac (yes, I am laughing my ass off while I write this). And really, given the amount of drinking and smoking involved, any music baby of ours is bound to be a little defective.

The extra rule this time around was that synths had to be involved. Terrifying. We decided to skip finding a drum beat--as had been the approach for the original holy trinity--and go straight to laying down synth riffs. Jake started (he won the coin toss) and found a nice bassy sound that I'm pretty sure ended up sounding exactly like a digital fart, so of course it was perfect. We put down 5 or 6 parts down in total, with salmon burgers slipped in there somewhere (yes, I had a chicken burger and a salmon burger that day), then we each took a turn at some guitar riffs.

At a certain point, Jake's fiance Krista "The Damn" Bever got home from work, which happened to be just in time for vocals. Since the song sat in a state of unarranged rifftastic chaos, it would have been damn near impossible to do traditional verse/chorus vocals, plus it was sounding dancier by the minute. Fortunately, I'd brought a print up of a whole bunch of quotes from an interview Marshall McLuhan did for Playbody in the late 60s (doesn't everybody carry around quotes from theorists in their back pockets?). It was decided that each of us would pick our favorite three lines from the pages and sing them, and that Jake would then edit them later.

And that's pretty much how I left the song that night. Yesterday Jake got a first mix of it to me and I was downright shocked. If you're going to have a retarded baby, this is the coolest way to do it, I must say.

Lyrics:

The viewer becomes the screen.

We can anticipate you and control you.

It doesn't mean a thing until you consume it.

Resenting it will not halt its progress.

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