A Compromise and Delicate Balance, Maybe, and That's Final

As I wrote before about what I've been calling The Retro Project but which is actually an entry for Simon Holland (aka Carrillion)'s 80's Bedroom Tape Compilation my original intention for this cassette based song was to only include vocals by the Speak n' Spell.

Currently, I have used up 3 of the 4 tracks available to me.  I like the song so far, but it sounds thin on content when I'm used to using 20-30 tracks for a song.  If I worked with 4 tracks everyday, I'd have a different attitude, but considering what I'm used to, it's hard to adapt.

The only thing I had planned for track 4 was the Speak n' Spell.  I've decided to crank up the Casio MT-540 again, which has a peculiar "sound effect" section, in that it contains sounds identical to the video game "Galaxian" in addition to the "natural" sounds that don't sound natural at all.  I'm thinking to add at least one sound effect from there to the vocal track with the Speak n' Spell.  But I still don't think it's enough. So I'll probably end up adding vocals of the traditional variety.  I was originally going to use an old poem, but with the lyrics from the Speak n' Spell, I need something different.

As such I started working on some lyrics.  I want to fill it with 80s references, to suit the theme of the project.  Having recently seen Cars 2 for the first time, the first thing I thought of was the Yugo.  Although the car was around for a little while longer, it's really a kind of mid 80s phenomena, meaning, my song is going to be a faux mid 80s song.

So, of course I had to have a shopping mall reference and I couldn't leave New Coke out, and given people's negative feelings toward that product, it's a negative reference.  Keeping with the beverage theme, we also have some wine coolers.

I struggled to figure out which band to name check.  I considered the Smiths and New Order, but settled on the Cure.  I'd have preferred to go with New Order, but I needed something with two syllables.  Such is the way with song lyrics (and poetry).

I didn't have one, because my family had an Apple IIe, but I knew a guy who ran a BBS at the time, using one of two Commidore 64s he had.  BBS was a kind of proto internet for those who don't know.  He also had two phone lines, one was dedicated to the BBS.  Not to get too Geeky, I also included a cyborg reference, because the first Terminator movie had been recently released to much popular acclaim.

This stuff is all fine and dandy but I wanted to punch up the drama a bit, and what was more dramatic in the mid 80s than the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.  I set the song's dramatic conclusion against the doomed space flight.  Like Kennedy for an earlier generation, Americans always remember how they heard about the Challenger explosion.

One thing I really wanted to avoid was the kind of self-consciousness I witnessed in the movie The Wedding Singer, which did things like referencing a Van Halen breakup in retrospective faux foreshadowing.  Nothing takes you out of the moment like those kinds of hindsight induced references.  In contrast, I wanted to write lyrics that sound like they could be from the mid 80s but super timely.  I did not want lyrics that sounded like they were written in 2012, as they were.

It's a delicate balance, actually.  Of course, you'll be the ultimate judge of my success.