Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Update on "(Catch) The Spirit (of 17)"

This song was conceived as part of "What You're Watching," a sketch comedy show we put together back in 2000. There are a couple of funny promotional parodies on there for a fictional station, KSUP, Super17. My idea was to parody those silly songs TV stations used to do with the anchors walking around town and pretending that they hang out with each other all the time. I envisioned a male voice doing the vocals, kind of like the guy who does those Bud Light "Real Men of Genius" commercials. Soon after I wrote the lyrics (here's an earlier post on the song), I found out my friend Richard Malmos was coming to town for his bi-annual float trip. He's a big-time L.A. voiceover guy. While he is away from L.A., he still does his sessions in a studio and they patch him through to his stations with a fancy phone line.

So I sent him the a scratch version of the song with sample vocals (a hilarious performance by Skap). So Rick has his daily session down at Wheeler Audio, a really nice post-production audio facility here in the Crossroads district of Kansas City.

So I go down there, and Janet Jameson is engineering the session. Janet is a very talented engineer and musician, so it was quite an honor to have her helping us out. Rick finished up his session (there was a lot of "Tomorrow night at 8!" type of a thing, and some fun movie stuff) and then he went in the booth and we got going.

The performance is absolutely hilarious. As he's doing his thing, Janet says, "He's channeling Neil Diamond!"

It turned out funnier than I imagined. Rick did an outstanding job and I'm anxious to get the rest of the music done.

Postscript: Skap and I had tossed around some ideas for what the vocalist should do at the end of the song, and we came up with some riffs on "he's infected, we're infected, she's infected." It has a couple of meanings, mainly that the song itself is obnoxiously infectious. And it really gives the song an ominous tone when you say something like "Now YOU'RE infected, baby!"

3 comments:

Foz the Hook said...

Many thanks to Rick! This is the kind of song that needs just the right kind of performance to make it work. Rick's melodious Neil Diamond voice adds a whole new level of cheese to this song that will break up the album nicely. Rick is the REAL Cheese Jesus! I think I mean that in a good way.

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