Sit down at your piano without any ideas. Start with Bennie and the Jets (or this Ben Folds song, doesn’t matter either way), then, casually glance at a tweet that places the hint of The Simpsons’ fake Michael Jackson “Lisa it’s your birthday” song in your head. Make up words that kinda hopefully sound cool and maybe mean something to someone. Finish writing and recording the whole thing before you notice any similarities in the melody to The Simpsons’ song. Finish with a polyphonic slow build to give the illusion of substance. Realize there are only four songs left and freak out. Read the rest of this entry »
Archives for posts with tag: piano
Imagine a big musical number. Now remove all of the instruments and professional singers, keeping only a piano and Chris. Now make sure that the piano playing is sloppy and that Chris has a sore throat, and that he started recording this with no idea where it was going, and was slightly drunk. Ok, go: Read the rest of this entry »
This, our 9th last song (!!), is probably best described as a cross between Apples in Stereo and Foo Fighters (or maybe just Dave without the band). Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Last weekend, Steve and Chris and significant others Erin and Claire gathered together in Toronto to eat, drink, play Settlers of Catan, and write this song. Since they like games, they decided to turn this into a game of sorts. First, Steve came up with a melody and taught it to everyone. Then we all brainstormed some rhyming and phrasing rules before passing a computer around the circle, writing one line at a time. The trick was that you were only allowed to see the line immediately before yours; all other lyrics were blacked out. Every word is a mystery, every line changes what I see. Read the rest of this entry »
When we first started explaining this project to people late last year, an annoyingly common reaction was, “well yeah, but what counts as a song? I mean, you could just go ‘flurp!’ into a microphone and call that a song, and then you’d be done for a week, right?” We were obviously not going to do that. But some weeks have been more experimental than others. Today’s song, while hopefully better than “flurp!,” is really a single simple song idea flushed out into a soundscape. And it took 40 minutes to complete, including writing, recording and mixing, so judge it accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »
Wow, this is getting real. 52 song project is actually winding down. Just 11 more weeks to go… satisfying and yet a little sad (queue:Â segue) which leads us into this week’s song which borders on mourning. Leaning heavily on guitar for many of our songs, we thought we would throw out a piano piece. This quickly turned into something of a meandering lamentation which… oh, just go and listen already. Read the rest of this entry »
Every week we try to put a clever short blurb about the song here without giving away too much that we want to talk about in the “discussion” part below. The problem is, I don’t have a lot to say about this. I don’t know what this sounds like or is influenced by (aside from an obvious lyrical proximity to Bob Dylan), so I’ll let you work that out on your own. Heck, the real point of this text is just to fill space beside the illustration anyway. (Look! It’s a bell!) Read the rest of this entry »
After several weeks of working independently, we are proud, this week, to present a collaboration. Across both space and time, our two heroes have managed to throw together a poppy chorus with Canadian indy-rock influenced verses and record it for presentation here as the twenty third song out of fifty two. Just think, if songs were years, our little project would already be legally drinking throughout North America, and would be just two years off from being able to rent a car everywhere. What a magical time. Bah dap Bow! Read the rest of this entry »
Lady Gaga’s Monster came on shuffle the other day (not long after Kanye West’s Monster, incidentally) and it just seemed, well, a little one-sided. The singer accuses her target of being bad, evil, even though she admits to large gaps in her own memory. The story isn’t complete, the narrative is a bit too tidy. Therefore, in the spirit of Wicked, which retells the Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the witch, we guess at what someone else’s version of events might sound like. Read the rest of this entry »
Ok, this was rushed and is sloppy. The song was written Wednesday and recorded Thursday night. At 1 a.m. Thursday night/Friday morning, we were too lazy to write a blog post, so we shot a video blog instead. Then we didn’t sleep, because we needed to upload the video and post it this morning. And now it’s morning and the words and the brain aren’t working so um, here. Read the rest of this entry »
