SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: This has no source in scientific research; it’s a penitential cover of a song by a band named Werk from an album called Songs About Giant Isopods. You can still hear the song here, on Soundcloud.
ABSTRACT:
I feel like I owe a lot of apologies here. I do not know why I love the original of this song; I heard it in 2007 when the album came out, I wrote about it in one of the earliest entries on here, in those heady days when this website shared the internet with a social media platform called “MySpace” that musicians used to promote music and people used to share stuff with friends.
The song, I remember reading at the time, was made in not very much time, and basically consists of a simple techno backing track (using exactly three bass notes over and over, except during a break when there are only two) and some quickly jotted words based on an internet joke that was popular that year (random things were always stealing Gameboys back then) that were then fed into a speech-synthesis program called “Crap Talker.” Nowadays, it would be an app. Then, it was a program.
Crap Talker did not attempt to sound too realistic, and it had a setting where it would automatically sing whatever words you typed in. The melody was randomized somehow so that if you typed the same words into the program elsewhere, it would consistently sing them the same way. (I know this because I downloaded the program and tried it.) But that melody was sort of angular and weird – the phrases didn’t really follow human expectations for slow rises and falls in a progression. It was sort of arbitrarily choosing notes in a scale, jumping around unpredictably.
Somehow, this came out sounding very New Wave to me. I know I’m not the only person in the world to remember this song, because it got posted on Soundcloud not too long ago. And I’m not the only person to click on the “like” button there. But I would not be at all surprised if I remember it more than the person (or people) who originally wrote it.
I wanted to record this in as non-mechanical a way as I could. The piano is a MIDI instrument (though built from real samples), and the drums are the same kind of SoundFont. But it’s a real acoustic guitar and bass (with a ring modulator on the guitar to give it a little edge). And I do my best to sing that weird melody with my own real voice, with words as close as I could get to the original. They’re not written down anywhere, so I just listened to the song a few times and wrote down what I heard. . I did an embarrassing number of takes in a couple of different sessions to get it on key. I should put that much work into my own songs.
It’s also a little weird that I recorded this sort of simultaneously with the original song for March. I’ve basically been working on this for a few months, but it took that much time to get a moment where I could sing stupidly and loud without interruptions.
LYRICS:
(I-I-isopods)
Giant isopods have stolen my gameboy
They could not have known it’s not a deep-sea toy
It’s good to know they have not beat my high score
It’s hard to play Zelda if you’ve got clawsThey stole my Nintendo and warned me off
If I called the police they’d be back for more stuff
I wasn’t scared for the safety of my SuperNES
Living near the seaside wasn’t worth all this stress.(I-I-isopods)
Giant isopods have stolen my gameboy
They could not have known it’s not a deep-sea toy
It’s good to know they have not beat my high score
It’s hard to play Zelda if you’ve got clawsI asked them if I could keep my Pokemon Red
Can I swim well was all they said.
I thought my level-15 Bulbasaur
Was not worth dying for.
(I-I-isopods)