Friday, March 03, 2006

RIP, my once-beloved SY-77

Today is my three year anniversary with LucasArts and I celebrated with a cheesesteak from The Cheesesteak Shop. 'Twas good.

You know what's 'twas not good, though? Listening to things from my musical past. I burned a CD of old music by my high school band Phenix. On bass: Ben. On guitar: Ry. On drums: either Mr. Googazu himself, Mike Klova or Anthony Sciamanna. And on lead vocals and embarrassingly ridiculous keyboard solos: me. Christ ... why the rest of the band didn't stop me from playing keyboard back then, I'll never know.

Anyway, listening back to this stuff is like looking at an embarrassing school picture of yourself. Only, instead of it being a single photo, it's 15 different testaments to the fact that your lyric writing never really graduated beyond the level of "pretentious ass."

I'm listening to more of it while I write this. Seriously, Ry and Ben, what was with me and freakin' saw wave patches? Gah.

Anyway. I guess I'm celebrating my current musical gig by inspecting my musical past. But, since I have some music to go write, maybe I shouldn't be sitting here making myself feel like I don't know the first thing about music. Yeesh.

5 comments:

EmoRiot said...

Saw waves and portamento go together like pepperoni and jam.

Yeah, if you want to feel better just let it be known that you were writing the lyrics because you were so far out and away the best out of all of us. What does that say about me?

Bug said...

Yeah. And it's a total display of our influences at the time. The lyrics are just as muddled as anything by Rush or Yes. Comparing them now to the kind of lyrics I admire (Fiona Apple, Ray LaMontagne, etc.) really just isn't fair. Though, you can see with the last track we wrote (Point of Departure) that those kinds of lyrics were already starting to have an effect on my own lyric writing. It's by far the most sincere and honest lyrics I wrote for us.

As evidenced by the very awkward exchange I kept having with Mom over the lyrics:

Something better than this,
Better than this, better than this was promised to me.
Better than this, better than this,
Better than this was promised to be.

Everytime she heard those lyrics, she said to me "That's so true ... That's exactly how I feel ..."

::ahem:: Dysfunctional Household Fun!!

EmoRiot said...

Yeah I love that you were writing the divorce anthem for her, in her eyes.

Bug said...

Yeah, that was a special little moment in my lyric writing career.

No freakin' wonder Jon Anderson only ever seems to write about the Sun.

rooni said...

Yes, no freakin' wonder, indeed.