Oh God, the horror. The horror. Look at all that blood. What have we done to deserve this. Who could do such a thing.

"Insanity in 9/8 Time":

Soundtracking Your Life, Part Whatever We're Up To: This one is hard to explain. It's essentially an accident, dependent upon three separate, distinct events converging.

The first was my discovery of Garageband's Auto-tune Effect. I don't like Auto-tune--it's pretty much the musical equivalent of outright lying-- but if you're honest about it, it has its uses. I figured there was no harm in playing around with it, even if I never actually used it.

The second was learning how to use Garageband's built-in monitor (coincidentally*, from the same video). Previously I had though it was a worthless setting that did nothing but generate a metric fuckton of feedback. Apparently I was doing it wrong.

The third, and this is the one that was really important, was that I had been playing with the program's built-in metronome, trying to write a song in 9:8 time, just to see what it would sound like. When I was done I saved the file instead of deleting it, for some reason, and an hour ago I opened the (empty) file by accident to try some stuff out.

Anyway, headphones plus feedback plus trippy special effect meant equaled strange whooshing sound and long echoes every time I made any noise (even something like picking up a drumstick off a shelf). It turns out the special effects that sound like a famous R&B star at 90BPM sound like Hell opening up at 55BPM. It reminded me of the part of the movie where the guy is going insane so I though "Soundtracking Your Life gcrrble flrrgl flob" (I'm an abstract thinker). Live and learn and know when to exploit it.

I hit record and just started hitting stuff to see what sounds it made. Then I layered some fake piano to up the creepifictation, and the easiest Song I've ever written was done. And now you can hear it too. Wear headphones.

*Actually, it's pretty much the opposite of a coincidence? What's that word?

DOWNLOADABLE VERSION:

Rerelease Notes: This was the only StL song that was fully redone, partly because of audio quality issues and partly because there were some things I wanted to add to it, like the use of windchimes as percussion or using a half-decent MIDI instead of a MacBook keyboard. As a result, the album version is almost a minute longer. I added two new "noise" tracks as well, one of which has me playing, in turn, twelve different harmonicas (one in each key; this is my first song to use harmonica, though I've been playing it for years). The other new track has me playing various screeching noises on the violin, an instrument I'd only started on the day before--this is probably the only song where that wouldn't make a difference.