SotW 2.0

"Programming"

(Featuring Jonny Greenwood)

And so year 2 begins, after an inexcusably long hiatus. Remember a few weeks ago when I said I'd be done really soon? I'm a liar. And I wasn't even talking about this song then, so I'm like a double-liar.

As with a lot of other Songs of the Week, this one started with the title. I thought ,hey "Programming," that can mean a lot of different things. And so I went from there and tried to reference those different meanings in the song, so you get stuff from TV static, to computer-y blips and bloops, to out-of-context quotes about individuality* (the church bells, however, are just there to sound good).

That said, this is probably the hardest song I've done yet for two reasons. The first is that I'm a shitty piano player, and 90% of this song is done on synths, so there were a lot of retakes (especially for the electric piano part, which is the first time I've actually had to write something down before playing it). The other is that this song falls squarely into two genres I don't know much about, namely electronic music and jazz.

Most of the jazz influence has stripped away; originally the horn part was supposed to be more frantic and bebop-y, but I couldn't do it with the software, proving Mr. Greenwood has a point. The electronic parts, of course, stayed in. My total knowledge of electronic music goes as far as not just calling it all "techno"; I don't really know much about samples or synths or what subgenre this falls into. In some ways I think that works to the song's advantage, since I could just do what worked for the song itself, and it stands on its own more (which, of course fits the whole "technology and individuality" theme I was going for).

I was trying to find something that sounded futuristic, but familiar; ten years gone, not a thousand (or to put it another way, The Matrix, not Star Wars). The biggest influence was probably movie soundtracks, but I can't think of a specific movie. I'm working on a Soundtracking Your Life song that's similar, I might try and go into more detail there. There's a connection between all these sentences, and if you can actually make sense of all this, you get a cookie. The problem is, I wasn't thinking in words when I wrote the song, and I'm not sure how to translate. More later, but about something else.

*Speaking of which, is anybody else still watching Dollhouse? Somewhere in the last couple weeks, they went from "interesting but flawed" to "best show of 2009."

Downloadable Version:
Rerelease Notes: Some minor mixing stuff--fewer gaps, mainly.