Spirit Phone: Commentary - Revision history

Fry90000: added catagories

2025-03-05T20:01:23Z

added catagories

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:01, 5 March 2025
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	<references />		<references />
			[[Category:Commentary]]

Fry90000: /* When He Died */ switched somethings

2025-01-22T20:31:28Z

When He Died: switched somethings

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:31, 22 January 2025
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	I guess this one has a happy ending, sorta, like as a romance.		I guess this one has a happy ending, sorta, like as a romance.

			My favorite vocal track happens during this part, and it’s when it’s like half faded out, but it’s the- this part, the woah-woah-woah harmony. That’s me acknowledging that adding a ton of reverb smooths things out. And to transition into When He Died, which is more of an explicitly horror-themed song, I recorded these janky synths to an actual cassette tape and I played them back through this vintage RadioShack battery-operated cassette player. And if you pick it up and you shake it, it sounds very warble-y and very spooky. I highly recommend listening to all music in this way.

	===[[When He Died]]===		===[[When He Died]]===
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	Ah, I really hit that note there. I’m pretty happy with my vocals on this track. I feel like the melody of this song is pretty up and down, probably one of the harder ones to do. That being said there’s a lot of little notes that I would love to go in and do better, or they just sound off now. But I guess that means I’m improving? That I can hear those imperfections. I know when I was younger, I couldn’t. I didn’t think I was good, but I just couldn’t tell I was specifically really bad. And if you listen closely, there’s like a little heartbeat kick drum here…		Ah, I really hit that note there. I’m pretty happy with my vocals on this track. I feel like the melody of this song is pretty up and down, probably one of the harder ones to do. That being said there’s a lot of little notes that I would love to go in and do better, or they just sound off now. But I guess that means I’m improving? That I can hear those imperfections. I know when I was younger, I couldn’t. I didn’t think I was good, but I just couldn’t tell I was specifically really bad. And if you listen closely, there’s like a little heartbeat kick drum here…

	My favorite vocal track happens during this part, and it’s when it’s like half faded out, but it’s the- this part, the woah-woah-woah harmony. That’s me acknowledging that adding a ton of reverb smooths things out. And to transition into When He Died, which is more of an explicitly horror-themed song, I recorded these janky synths to an actual cassette tape and I played them back through this vintage RadioShack battery-operated cassette player. And if you pick it up and you shake it, it sounds very warble-y and very spooky. I highly recommend listening to all music in this way.

	===[[Sweet Bod]]===		===[[Sweet Bod]]===

Fry90000: /* Lifetime Achievement Award */ fixed typo

2024-12-20T14:59:33Z

Lifetime Achievement Award: fixed typo

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:59, 20 December 2024
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	The chorus uses, in addition to me screaming, a computer... voice? It's actually, not a- not a real one, but it's an emulated Atari speech synthesis, uh, program, and those things are so bad at pronouncing things I had to break up the words into individual syllables just so it wouldn't be "cem-ah-ter-y" instead of cemetery.		The chorus uses, in addition to me screaming, a computer... voice? It's actually, not a- not a real one, but it's an emulated Atari speech synthesis, uh, program, and those things are so bad at pronouncing things I had to break up the words into individual syllables just so it wouldn't be "cem-ah-ter-y" instead of cemetery.

	Uh, an earlier version of this song was a totally different recording that I, I just worked on it too long and it just started to sound bad to me so I scrapped almost everything and I recreated it from scratch. And I listened to it recently and, this always happens, but I was like "oh, this is kinda better in some ways" and that's just, egh, really aggravating. But that version was missing a few important chunks I think and starting over made it easier to kinda insert, uh, a few extra bars here and there to spread out the lyrics a little bit, and this, uh, pretty cool ~~keybaord~~ solo wasn't in that version, so it was worth it, I think. But of course all my friends who I would send early versions of this song to, uh, when they heard the, the new version they did not like it as much. That always seems to happen. In fact, it happened, uh, publicly 'cause I put out an early version of Reaganomics, later on this album, and people got used to listening to that version, and then I changed a bunch of stuff, and a lot of people did not like it as much. Now, one solution to this is for me not to take 8 years to make an album, and uh, don't feel guilty about not putting out enough content and end up releasing songs early and in an unfinished state so people can just know that I'm not dead, and I'm actually working on music, but now I'm not even talking about this song, so let me, let me stop myself right there. Actually, the only note that I missed is, uh, earlier, when I said, uh, "you're unnatural, babe," which is a pun on "you're ''a'' natural" / "you're ''un''natural." Originally, that was just "you're unstoppable, babe." So, I got a bad pun in there, that's one thing I improved over the original, cool.		Uh, an earlier version of this song was a totally different recording that I, I just worked on it too long and it just started to sound bad to me so I scrapped almost everything and I recreated it from scratch. And I listened to it recently and, this always happens, but I was like "oh, this is kinda better in some ways" and that's just, egh, really aggravating. But that version was missing a few important chunks I think and starting over made it easier to kinda insert, uh, a few extra bars here and there to spread out the lyrics a little bit, and this, uh, pretty cool keyboard solo wasn't in that version, so it was worth it, I think. But of course all my friends who I would send early versions of this song to, uh, when they heard the, the new version they did not like it as much. That always seems to happen. In fact, it happened, uh, publicly 'cause I put out an early version of Reaganomics, later on this album, and people got used to listening to that version, and then I changed a bunch of stuff, and a lot of people did not like it as much. Now, one solution to this is for me not to take 8 years to make an album, and uh, don't feel guilty about not putting out enough content and end up releasing songs early and in an unfinished state so people can just know that I'm not dead, and I'm actually working on music, but now I'm not even talking about this song, so let me, let me stop myself right there. Actually, the only note that I missed is, uh, earlier, when I said, uh, "you're unnatural, babe," which is a pun on "you're ''a'' natural" / "you're ''un''natural." Originally, that was just "you're unstoppable, babe." So, I got a bad pun in there, that's one thing I improved over the original, cool.

	Most of my songs there's just one tempo that's locked in, but, uh, for this I tried to add little moments where it slows down or give a drum fill a little room to breathe, and that helps it make it feel like a more alive song. So, this part is, it's my voice going through a really deep synthesizer-vocoder effect, and I am paraphrasing the disclaimer that shows up at the beginning of the, uh, the video for Thriller, where Michael Jackson, I guess, um, had a crisis of conscience and uh, just had to make sure that everyone knows that, err, he's not a practitioner of magic or whatever, so, uh, I just took that phrase 'cause it's pretty well worded, and I kinda turned it into a pledge of allegiance type call-and-response thing with some robots. And for some reason with the robot voice, the word 'record' sounded not robotic, I had to say rec''o''rd, rec''ooooo''rd.		Most of my songs there's just one tempo that's locked in, but, uh, for this I tried to add little moments where it slows down or give a drum fill a little room to breathe, and that helps it make it feel like a more alive song. So, this part is, it's my voice going through a really deep synthesizer-vocoder effect, and I am paraphrasing the disclaimer that shows up at the beginning of the, uh, the video for Thriller, where Michael Jackson, I guess, um, had a crisis of conscience and uh, just had to make sure that everyone knows that, err, he's not a practitioner of magic or whatever, so, uh, I just took that phrase 'cause it's pretty well worded, and I kinda turned it into a pledge of allegiance type call-and-response thing with some robots. And for some reason with the robot voice, the word 'record' sounded not robotic, I had to say rec''o''rd, rec''ooooo''rd.

Callowrat: added references

2023-09-12T04:20:13Z

added references

← Older revision		Revision as of 04:20, 12 September 2023
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	So this is another kind of “Doo-wop with a weird twist” type of song. It uses that classic 4-chord 50s progression, I believe it’s called. But it switches between Lydian and Diatonic scales for the first two and the last two chords of that progression, and what that means is that there’s literally like one note that is off from what you’d expect from this kind of song. You can’t hear it on my vocals but it’s in some of the backup instruments and the guitar solo that comes later.		So this is another kind of “Doo-wop with a weird twist” type of song. It uses that classic 4-chord 50s progression, I believe it’s called. But it switches between Lydian and Diatonic scales for the first two and the last two chords of that progression, and what that means is that there’s literally like one note that is off from what you’d expect from this kind of song. You can’t hear it on my vocals but it’s in some of the backup instruments and the guitar solo that comes later.

	Everyone always compares this glockenspiel part to the theme from Rugrats and I disagree, it’s clearly supposed to evoke Take Me There by Blackstreet. Totally different song.		Everyone always compares this glockenspiel part to the theme from Rugrats and I disagree, it’s clearly supposed to evoke Take Me There by Blackstreet.<ref>Take Me There by Blackstreet is a song that contains interpolations of the Rugrats theme.</ref> Totally different song.

	You can hear some flourishes from this janky little toy wooden harp that’s like, tuned beyond saving. You can hear it in its full glory whenever Snape appears in the [[Potter Puppet Pals]] Halloween Special that I made some years back. I definitely have a habit of finding and collecting weird little instruments like that and forgetting to use them or just not finding a place to use them, so I’m glad when I can use a messed up harp in a song chuckles.		You can hear some flourishes from this janky little toy wooden harp that’s like, tuned beyond saving. You can hear it in its full glory whenever Snape appears in the [[Potter Puppet Pals]] Halloween Special that I made some years back. I definitely have a habit of finding and collecting weird little instruments like that and forgetting to use them or just not finding a place to use them, so I’m glad when I can use a messed up harp in a song chuckles.
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	KEY CHANGE CHORUS! That’s a cheap but effective trick in songwriting. I really like the pitched up la-la-las in the right channel, they sound like cartoon cats.		KEY CHANGE CHORUS! That’s a cheap but effective trick in songwriting. I really like the pitched up la-la-las in the right channel, they sound like cartoon cats.

	Does anyone remember like statues that cried blood…? That was a thing…? I think I probably saw it in an episode of Sightings... maybe on the Sci-Fi channel.		Does anyone remember like statues that cried blood…? That was a thing…? I think I probably saw it in an episode of Sightings... maybe on the Sci-Fi channel.<ref> When He Died is actually the second Lemon Demon song to mention statues crying blood, the first being [[Subtle Oddities]].</ref>

	When I was working on this song They Might Be Giants came out with a song called [https://youtu.be/kSQ8tZ35t4U?si=7XeI61fWrZ8v45bY When Will You Die], and I was briefly worried that they would be too similar, but thankfully they’re very different. But I do highly recommend that song, for the record. It’s a good one.		When I was working on this song They Might Be Giants came out with a song called [https://youtu.be/kSQ8tZ35t4U?si=7XeI61fWrZ8v45bY When Will You Die], and I was briefly worried that they would be too similar, but thankfully they’re very different. But I do highly recommend that song, for the record. It’s a good one.
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	This is a trick that I should really do more often where it’s- you have a different part at the beginning that comes back later as the bridge. I always feel a sense of intent when that happens.		This is a trick that I should really do more often where it’s- you have a different part at the beginning that comes back later as the bridge. I always feel a sense of intent when that happens.

	So this song is mostly in 6/4 time, which is not the weirdest time signature, but for some reason it’s not very common. The vast majority of pop music is in 4/4…? And, whenever someone wants to be different, or difficult, they usually pick a weird odd number to time signature. The problem with doing that is, the inevitable “This sounds like Rush,” comment. But, 6/4 feels natural to me: it’s 4 beats, then 2 beats, and repeat. And speaking of being difficult, this song has backup vocals that are singing different lines over the main vocals, so if you want to sing along you really have to pick one or the other. And then the chorus is back to 4/4 time.		So this song is mostly in 6/4 time, which is not the weirdest time signature, but for some reason it’s not very common. The vast majority of pop music is in 4/4…? And, whenever someone wants to be different, or difficult, they usually pick a weird odd number to time signature. The problem with doing that is, the inevitable “This sounds like Rush,” comment.<ref>In the Damn Skippy commentary, Neil mentions how someone told him his song Subtle Oddities sounds like Rush because of it's odd time signature. Guess he's still stuck up about that.</ref> But, 6/4 feels natural to me: it’s 4 beats, then 2 beats, and repeat. And speaking of being difficult, this song has backup vocals that are singing different lines over the main vocals, so if you want to sing along you really have to pick one or the other. And then the chorus is back to 4/4 time.

	This is definitely one of those songs where I was thinking of an interesting sounding word, Reaganomics, and I had checked to see if any other songs had been written with that as a title, and I saw that it was up for grabs and I just went for it. There’s a band by that name who do 80s covers, but I figured that was different enough. But actually, I was wrong! There was another song, at least one other song, called [https://youtu.be/jgcbXn-qomg?si=IkKb5ym3BGlpse2_ Reaganomics and it’s from the year 1985 by D.R.I.], a thrash metal band, and it’s 42 seconds long. I just listened to it- the lyrics are like, “Reaganomics killing me, Reaganomics killing you.” I have to hand it to those boys, their song is more to-the-point than mine.		This is definitely one of those songs where I was thinking of an interesting sounding word, Reaganomics, and I had checked to see if any other songs had been written with that as a title, and I saw that it was up for grabs and I just went for it. There’s a band by that name who do 80s covers, but I figured that was different enough. But actually, I was wrong! There was another song, at least one other song, called [https://youtu.be/jgcbXn-qomg?si=IkKb5ym3BGlpse2_ Reaganomics and it’s from the year 1985 by D.R.I.], a thrash metal band, and it’s 42 seconds long. I just listened to it- the lyrics are like, “Reaganomics killing me, Reaganomics killing you.” I have to hand it to those boys, their song is more to-the-point than mine.
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	===Outro===		===Outro===
	And that’s, ultimately, what this album was about. I think it’s got a certain tone- despite using multiple genres. But these songs were written separately over multiple years spanning a lot of changes in my life, and with that in mind, of course there’s no singular theme that ties them all together, but I did luck out and they all kinda fit within three or four categories, I guess. And they gel in a way that, hopefully, kinda justifies it being such a long album. And if you’re listening to this I guess you liked it enough to listen to me talk about it for this long, and I’m extremely lucky and grateful that there are people like you who listened to this album and… actually felt something. Even after putting out music for 2/3s of my life… that’s still a really magical feeling so thank you, thank you, thank you.		And that’s, ultimately, what this album was about. I think it’s got a certain tone- despite using multiple genres. But these songs were written separately over multiple years spanning a lot of changes in my life, and with that in mind, of course there’s no singular theme that ties them all together, but I did luck out and they all kinda fit within three or four categories, I guess. And they gel in a way that, hopefully, kinda justifies it being such a long album. And if you’re listening to this I guess you liked it enough to listen to me talk about it for this long, and I’m extremely lucky and grateful that there are people like you who listened to this album and… actually felt something. Even after putting out music for 2/3s of my life… that’s still a really magical feeling so thank you, thank you, thank you.

			==Trivia==

			<references />

Callowrat: fixed spelling errors

2023-09-12T04:09:21Z

fixed spelling errors

← Older revision		Revision as of 04:09, 12 September 2023
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	So, Spirit Phone began as soon as my last album [[View-Monster]] came out which was 2008. And it came out 2016. I still put out music in the intervening years but they were just short EPs and sample-based mashup albums, this was a long-in-the-works return to a full-length original music album. And there were multiple times when I thought I had this thing in the bag, and I was telling people "Yeah, it's gonna come out this year!" "It's gonna come out next year!" "It's almost done!" And you know, all these tracks were almost, quote-on-quote 90% done no matter how much I messed with them. But eventually, I figured it out.		So, Spirit Phone began as soon as my last album [[View-Monster]] came out which was 2008. And it came out 2016. I still put out music in the intervening years but they were just short EPs and sample-based mashup albums, this was a long-in-the-works return to a full-length original music album. And there were multiple times when I thought I had this thing in the bag, and I was telling people "Yeah, it's gonna come out this year!" "It's gonna come out next year!" "It's almost done!" And you know, all these tracks were almost, quote-on-quote 90% done no matter how much I messed with them. But eventually, I figured it out.

	===[[Lifetime ~~Acheivement~~ Award]]===		===[[Lifetime Achievement Award]]===
	So, to rewind a bit, this album starts off with some white noise, some soft white noise, spooky sounds, and then the music begins. The white noise returns throughout the album a few times, what does it mean? It's a ghost. That's what it means.		So, to rewind a bit, this album starts off with some white noise, some soft white noise, spooky sounds, and then the music begins. The white noise returns throughout the album a few times, what does it mean? It's a ghost. That's what it means.

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	Most of my songs there's just one tempo that's locked in, but, uh, for this I tried to add little moments where it slows down or give a drum fill a little room to breathe, and that helps it make it feel like a more alive song. So, this part is, it's my voice going through a really deep synthesizer-vocoder effect, and I am paraphrasing the disclaimer that shows up at the beginning of the, uh, the video for Thriller, where Michael Jackson, I guess, um, had a crisis of conscience and uh, just had to make sure that everyone knows that, err, he's not a practitioner of magic or whatever, so, uh, I just took that phrase 'cause it's pretty well worded, and I kinda turned it into a pledge of allegiance type call-and-response thing with some robots. And for some reason with the robot voice, the word 'record' sounded not robotic, I had to say rec''o''rd, rec''ooooo''rd.		Most of my songs there's just one tempo that's locked in, but, uh, for this I tried to add little moments where it slows down or give a drum fill a little room to breathe, and that helps it make it feel like a more alive song. So, this part is, it's my voice going through a really deep synthesizer-vocoder effect, and I am paraphrasing the disclaimer that shows up at the beginning of the, uh, the video for Thriller, where Michael Jackson, I guess, um, had a crisis of conscience and uh, just had to make sure that everyone knows that, err, he's not a practitioner of magic or whatever, so, uh, I just took that phrase 'cause it's pretty well worded, and I kinda turned it into a pledge of allegiance type call-and-response thing with some robots. And for some reason with the robot voice, the word 'record' sounded not robotic, I had to say rec''o''rd, rec''ooooo''rd.

	===[[Touch Tone Telephone]]===		===[[Touch-Tone Telephone]]===
	Making this little acapella intro involved, like, four or five different vocal tracks, and, some of them are doing you know, like, the main chords-- ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, and then there's one track that's doing all the, uh, in-between notes, and that one sounds really funny on it's own, it's just me going bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. I've got a fake string quartet going in this song, that uh, to my ears sounds pretty good. I've always found that strings are one of the hardest instruments to make sound realistic with just a computer, but I found a pretty good sound library that is sadly discontinued now.		Making this little acapella intro involved, like, four or five different vocal tracks, and, some of them are doing you know, like, the main chords-- ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, and then there's one track that's doing all the, uh, in-between notes, and that one sounds really funny on it's own, it's just me going bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. I've got a fake string quartet going in this song, that uh, to my ears sounds pretty good. I've always found that strings are one of the hardest instruments to make sound realistic with just a computer, but I found a pretty good sound library that is sadly discontinued now.

Callowrat: Fixed year

2023-09-12T04:08:12Z

Fixed year

← Older revision		Revision as of 04:08, 12 September 2023
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	\|title = Spirit Phone: Commentary		\|title = Spirit Phone: Commentary
	\|artist = Lemon Demon		\|artist = Lemon Demon
	\|year = ~~2016~~		\|year = 2018
	\|albumart = Spirit Phone.jpg		\|albumart = Spirit Phone.jpg
	\|writer = Neil Cicierega		\|writer = Neil Cicierega

Callowrat: wiki link to experiments

2023-09-12T04:07:40Z

wiki link to experiments

← Older revision		Revision as of 04:07, 12 September 2023
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	So, to rewind a bit, this album starts off with some white noise, some soft white noise, spooky sounds, and then the music begins. The white noise returns throughout the album a few times, what does it mean? It's a ghost. That's what it means.		So, to rewind a bit, this album starts off with some white noise, some soft white noise, spooky sounds, and then the music begins. The white noise returns throughout the album a few times, what does it mean? It's a ghost. That's what it means.

	This track is called Lifetime Acheivement Award. I picked that title late in production, I didn't feel like any of the lines from the actual chorus of the song worked as a title, uh, some early versions I think were named "Experiments in the Revival" which is a reference to ''Experiments in the Revival of Organisms,'' a 1940's Soviet medical film where they supposedly kept a severed dog's head alive with science. I've never actually watched this clip 'cause it just sounds really disturbing, although it's possibly fake, but I'm glad I didn't go with that title because, it's maybe too freaky a reference right out of the gate. Nonetheless, I got this whole song about creepy scientists reviving dead musicians, reviving them straight into new contracts like performing animals.		This track is called Lifetime Acheivement Award. I picked that title late in production, I didn't feel like any of the lines from the actual chorus of the song worked as a title, uh, some early versions I think were named "Experiments in the Revival" which is a reference to ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms Experiments in the Revival of Organisms],'' a 1940's Soviet medical film where they supposedly kept a severed dog's head alive with science. I've never actually watched this clip 'cause it just sounds really disturbing, although it's possibly fake, but I'm glad I didn't go with that title because, it's maybe too freaky a reference right out of the gate. Nonetheless, I got this whole song about creepy scientists reviving dead musicians, reviving them straight into new contracts like performing animals.

	This song idea goes back to 2012, when there was that whole, I guess scandal about the hologram version of 2pac. Remember that? I barely remember that. But, anyway, the early 2010's is where this song was born. And the references to Michael Jackson's death and to Katy Perry sort of dated, but not too badly, 'cause Katy Perry's still doing her thing and Michael Jackson's still dead!		This song idea goes back to 2012, when there was that whole, I guess scandal about the hologram version of 2pac. Remember that? I barely remember that. But, anyway, the early 2010's is where this song was born. And the references to Michael Jackson's death and to Katy Perry sort of dated, but not too badly, 'cause Katy Perry's still doing her thing and Michael Jackson's still dead!

Callowrat: Added page info

2023-09-12T04:04:59Z

Added page info

Show changes