Intro
Hey buddies! Uh, Neil Cicierega here. I am Lemon Demon, the musician that made Spirit Phone, this album. This is a commentary track for an album, which is weird. It’s hard to talk and listen at the same time so, after a few failed attempts, I ended up writing a lot of notes. So, sometimes, if I sound like I know what I’m saying, it’s because I’m reading from a script. And other times uh… I’ll sound... uh… like, you know… what’s the word... bad.
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 always telling people like, “Yeah it’s gonna come out this year! It’s gonna come out next year! It’s almost done!” and, y’know, all of these tracks were almost quote-unquote “90% done” no matter how much I messed with them. But eventually, I figured it out.
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.
This track is called Lifetime Achievement Award, I picked that title late in production. I didn’t feel like any lines from the actual chorus of the song worked as a title. Some early versions, I think, were named Experiments in the Revival, which is a reference to Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, a 1940s soviet medical film where they supposedly kept a severed dog’s head alive with science. I’ve never actually watched this clip because 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’ve 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, anyways, the early 2010s is where this song was born, and the references to Michael Jackson’s death and to Katy Perry sort-of date it, but not too badly. Because Katy Perry is still doing her thing and Michael Jackson’s still dead!
The chorus uses, in addition to me screaming, a computer voice…? It’s actually not a real one but an emulated Atari speech synthesis 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 ce-mah-tree instead of cemetery.
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, “Agh, 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 a few extra bars here and there to spread out the lyrics a little bit - and this 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, when they heard the new version, they did not like it as much. That always seems to happen. In fact that happened publicly because 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 eight years to make an album, and, uh, don’t feel guilty about not putting out enough content, and end up releasing songs early, 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 earlier, when I said: “You’re unnatural, babe,” which is a pun on “You’re a natural,” “You're unnatural.” 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 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 makes 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 video for Thriller, where Michael Jackson I guess, had a crisis of conscience and just had to make sure that everyone knows that ehh- he’s not a… practitioner of magic or whatever. So, I just took that phrase because 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 just sounded not-robotic. I had to say record- recooord.
Touch-Tone Telephone
Making this little acapella intro involved like 4 or 5 different vocal tracks, and some of them are doing like you know like the main chords, [in-tune] ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, but then there’s one track that’s doing all the in-between notes, and that one sounds really funny on its own. It’s just me going, [flat] ba ba ba ba ba ba. I’ve got a fake string quartet going in this song that to my ear sounds pretty good. I’ve always found that strings are one of the hardest instruments to make sound realistic using just a computer, but I found a pretty good sound library that is, sadly, discontinued now.
So… this song is about a dedicated caller into a radio show who has it all. figured. out. and he just needs to explain it to someone, and even just knowing how he’s gonna sound to other people is giving him all this anxiety and it’s coming out before he can even say what he wants so say. In fact, it never comes out. So, this song is just a big rant of preemptive defensiveness and saying you’re gonna do something without ever doing it. And I name drop Robert Stack and Leonard Nimoy who hosted, respectively, Unsolved Mysteries and In Search Of, which were both shows that dealt with bizarre and often paranormal stories and tales. And, I actually love to read about UFOs and paranormal stuff even though I’m not a real believer. When I was a kid it was just a fun thing to stretch my imagination with, I guess.
On my Patreon I posted an early early ancestor of this song called Ivanushka which was based on the movie Jack Frost which was a Mystery Science Theater episode. And that song had a lot of different sounding parts but one of them was the- basically the chorus of this song, only I was singing about Father Mushroom and Ivanushka. And that happens all the time in my process. I will find melodies in songs- unfinished songs from years and years ago, and since they’re mine and I’ve never done anything with them, I’m free to basically plagiarize myself. And a lot of the time these melodies will just kinda stay in my head for years and that’s how they’ll end up getting reused. I’ll be going through old files and then I’ll realize, "Oh I actually did record this melody a long time ago and I totally forgot,” but the flip-side of that is discovering something like that can be a little depressing cause it reminds me, “Oh man I… take so long to finish music.”
Writing this little rap here was great because I got to use a lot of little um… just like phrases and stems that I had written in a big text file I always wanted to use. Like the word UFOlogy, [in time with the lyrics] or name dropping Ancient Aliens. I actually just paused and checked my old lyrics.txt file and, yeah, I totally wrote: species of big cat, I am Robert Stack, UFOlogy, Demonology, all like in this little paragraph. So I guess that’s where this song came from. And the Super Sargasso Sea that I mention was a sort of thought experiment by Charles Fort, who was a very interesting early cataloger of (catalogist? of) the paranormal or seemingly impossible stories. Look him up!
Hey buddies! Uh, Neil Cicierega here. I am Lemon Demon, the musician that made Spirit Phone, this album. This is a commentary track for an album, which is weird. It’s hard to talk and listen at the same time so, after a few failed attempts, I ended up writing a lot of notes. So, sometimes, if I sound like I know what I’m saying, it’s because I’m reading from a script. And other times uh… I’ll sound... uh… like, you know… what’s the word... bad.
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 always telling people like, “Yeah it’s gonna come out this year! It’s gonna come out next year! It’s almost done!” and, y’know, all of these tracks were almost quote-unquote “90% done” no matter how much I messed with them. But eventually, I figured it out.
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.
This track is called Lifetime Achievement Award, I picked that title late in production. I didn’t feel like any lines from the actual chorus of the song worked as a title. Some early versions, I think, were named Experiments in the Revival, which is a reference to Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, a 1940s soviet medical film where they supposedly kept a severed dog’s head alive with science. I’ve never actually watched this clip because 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’ve 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, anyways, the early 2010s is where this song was born, and the references to Michael Jackson’s death and to Katy Perry sort-of date it, but not too badly. Because Katy Perry is still doing her thing and Michael Jackson’s still dead!
The chorus uses, in addition to me screaming, a computer voice…? It’s actually not a real one but an emulated Atari speech synthesis 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 ce-mah-tree instead of cemetery.
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, “Agh, 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 a few extra bars here and there to spread out the lyrics a little bit - and this 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, when they heard the new version, they did not like it as much. That always seems to happen. In fact that happened publicly because 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 eight years to make an album, and, uh, don’t feel guilty about not putting out enough content, and end up releasing songs early, 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 earlier, when I said: “You’re unnatural, babe,” which is a pun on “You’re a natural,” “You're unnatural.” 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 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 makes 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 video for Thriller, where Michael Jackson I guess, had a crisis of conscience and just had to make sure that everyone knows that ehh- he’s not a… practitioner of magic or whatever. So, I just took that phrase because 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 just sounded not-robotic. I had to say record- recooord.
Touch-Tone Telephone
Making this little acapella intro involved like 4 or 5 different vocal tracks, and some of them are doing like you know like the main chords, [in-tune] ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, but then there’s one track that’s doing all the in-between notes, and that one sounds really funny on its own. It’s just me going, [flat] ba ba ba ba ba ba. I’ve got a fake string quartet going in this song that to my ear sounds pretty good. I’ve always found that strings are one of the hardest instruments to make sound realistic using just a computer, but I found a pretty good sound library that is, sadly, discontinued now.
So… this song is about a dedicated caller into a radio show who has it all. figured. out. and he just needs to explain it to someone, and even just knowing how he’s gonna sound to other people is giving him all this anxiety and it’s coming out before he can even say what he wants so say. In fact, it never comes out. So, this song is just a big rant of preemptive defensiveness and saying you’re gonna do something without ever doing it. And I name drop Robert Stack and Leonard Nimoy who hosted, respectively, Unsolved Mysteries and In Search Of, which were both shows that dealt with bizarre and often paranormal stories and tales. And, I actually love to read about UFOs and paranormal stuff even though I’m not a real believer. When I was a kid it was just a fun thing to stretch my imagination with, I guess.
On my Patreon I posted an early early ancestor of this song called Ivanushka which was based on the movie Jack Frost which was a Mystery Science Theater episode. And that song had a lot of different sounding parts but one of them was the- basically the chorus of this song, only I was singing about Father Mushroom and Ivanushka. And that happens all the time in my process. I will find melodies in songs- unfinished songs from years and years ago, and since they’re mine and I’ve never done anything with them, I’m free to basically plagiarize myself. And a lot of the time these melodies will just kinda stay in my head for years and that’s how they’ll end up getting reused. I’ll be going through old files and then I’ll realize, "Oh I actually did record this melody a long time ago and I totally forgot,” but the flip-side of that is discovering something like that can be a little depressing cause it reminds me, “Oh man I… take so long to finish music.”
Writing this little rap here was great because I got to use a lot of little um… just like phrases and stems that I had written in a big text file I always wanted to use. Like the word UFOlogy, [in time with the lyrics] or name dropping Ancient Aliens. I actually just paused and checked my old lyrics.txt file and, yeah, I totally wrote: species of big cat, I am Robert Stack, UFOlogy, Demonology, all like in this little paragraph. So I guess that’s where this song came from. And the Super Sargasso Sea that I mention was a sort of thought experiment by Charles Fort, who was a very interesting early cataloger of (catalogist? of) the paranormal or seemingly impossible stories. Look him up!
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