SONG: Electronics Follow

SONG: “Electronics Follow”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE:First Digital Pill Approved to Worries About Biomedical ‘Big Brother’,” The New York Times, 13 Nov 2017, as used in the post “FDA OKs putting tracking devices in schizophrenia pills. (Yes. They really did.)

ABSTRACT:
So I missed a month. This is a two-month song. It’s also a five-device, four-operating-system song – I had to migrate from machine to machine to get things done. The guitar and vocals were recorded on iPhone voice memo with the phone in the bathroom sink, using a laptop as a click track… then transferred onto a variety of PCs and, at one point, to my Mac at work to convert file formats. It was a little crazy, I guess. Now, I have a $45 used laptop from eBay which I haven’t Linuxed yet, but plan to soon.

All that aside, I like the way the song turned out. As a song, I mean. We’ve got a Nintendo synth flute dueling with a whistle for a solo, we’ve got a fat, faraway organ, we’ve got an F# in the bridge with a lyric I really like (“Just like clockwork on my tongue”), and most of all, a song that’s about pills that monitor whether you’re taking them… so it’s also about living with surveillance, living over-close with your guardians, living somewhere between paranoia and nurture. I have to take pills every day and I resent that, and they’re not telling anybody about what I’m doing. Yet… I know, I know. They keep me going. So, that was my way in here.

LYRICS:

Let’s take some alligator clips
And make connections in
(c#) between the rusty cages of our skulls

Let’s convert our wire frames
Into a fine antenna
(C#) let’s wave our fingers in the air
– and we swallow the chemicals down
– and the electronics follow

V2
Now take the walls of our private rooms
Turn them into the walls of a (c#)fishbowl …

Now seamless, unbroken, transparent 
We will
(C#) barely feel them there
They might as well be air
– and we swallow the chemicals down
– and the electronics follow

Ch
I cannot see the things you see
But you can see the things I do
Every morning, every evening just like (f#)
Clockwork on my tongue
I cannot see these things 
Nor would I want to
(Solo vs)

V3/Br (c#…a …e…b )x 4
The signals passed between us
Will stay unspoken 
Like the love between
A mother and child. 
The signals passed between us
Will stay unspoken 
Like the fear between
Predator and prey. 
– and we swallow the chemicals down
– and the electronics follow
– and we swallow the chemicals down
– and the electronics follow