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THESE CHORDS ARE LIKE FAMILY TO ME




Ian C Stewart "These Chords are like Family to Me" MP3

From the 2003 made-to-be-made-not-made-to-be-heard album I Don't Know Why You Think I Won't Kill You.... this is the last song.

This was the beginning of my dabbling with intentional randomness in songwriting. The lyrics for the whole album were compiled from albums by other artists that I enjoyed a lot, such as Adrian Belew's Twang Bar King, The Cure's Pornography, Voivod Nothingface, Mercyful Fate Melissa etc.

I wrote out entire lines of their phrases and chopped them together. I think at the time I described it as 'sad psychedelic love songs about satan' overall, which is really being too generous.

The music was also randomly chosen from tablature found on t'interwebs for favorite songs of mine. In general I played the chords in reverse order to the original songs but I can still kind of tell in a couple of places what the songs were.

The titles were my own, obviously. Although I did chop together a list of titles using similar methods.

Sonically this album shares some DNA with my Devilcake box set solo album, An Alphabetical Food Odyssey, which had big beats and dog treats next to acoustic ballads.

I Don't Know Why You Think I Won't Kill You features the Roland GR-707 guitar synth, Chapman Stick, Yamaha DJX keyboard for beats, regular (& fretless) bass guitar and a hint of regular electric guitar as well.

The music isn't all bad, but it mostly never gels into anything coherent. The vocals, never my strong suit, are so bad that hopefully no one will ever hear them. The last four songs are short instrumentals and the best one is definitely the last one.............

Comments

reincheque said…
You are undoubtedly the King of Song Titles, and I bow in humility before your majestic magnificence...

Regards,


djp
Darrin said…
once again. nice toon.

if you ever plan on doing cut up lyrics again, let me know and I'll get you the program that I wrote when we were in Album-A-Day mode a coupla years back.

and on the right side of the metallidungeon, it looks like there is a pic of richard marx.
Ian Stewart said…
I think I still have the lyric randomizer program. It sucks that we stopped doing the random thing right after you made the killer app.

:)

The stairway to the 'dungeon' aka the basement features, it looks like a W.A.S.P. theme on the left wall and on the right I can make out Vinnie Vincent cradling his pink V (ooer) and the Richard Marx mirage is................
Don Dokken.

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