Also, on an unrelated note, we have a show on May 18th at The Rutledge in Nashville! More details to come.

CLICK HERE to see the video! To see more videos by Andrew Kepple, go here, and to get a copy of our new Garfield song, click here.

A music video for Hulkulele is being made by Grant Wooley, aka WooleyWorld! And this is a still from it! Yes!!!

Thanks to everyone who came to our show at MTAC! We had a blast. That con is really great, and we hope to be there again in the future!

Here’s our setlist from the show, with some song downloads!
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream
Radiation Mutation Transformation
Hulkulele
I’m Just Your Problem
What Time Is It? (Adventure Time)
Lizards in the Sky
Night Mare
Sharktopus

Here’s our set from last night, with free mp3s of some songs!

In Space No One Can Hear You Scream
Lizards in the Sky
Radiation Mutation Transformation
Hulkulele
Burning Ambitions
What Time Is It? (Adventure Time)
Extinct
Raichu a Song
Gypsy Eyes
Sharktopus

For more details, visit the Facebook event page!

The songs played at this show were: (right click to download)
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream
Lizards in the Sky
Radiation Mutation Transformation
Hulkulele
Burning Ambitions
Extinct
Gypsy Eyes (no vocals)

In Retrospect: Convention

Wow! This song is quite a blast from the past. In fact, I wrote this song while I was still in high school. And being that it’s the product of a high school kid, it’s pretty flawed. But it’s certainly not the worst thing to come out of that time period. At this song shows the slightest bit of promise that I might, at some point, become decent at songwriting. (I still don’t really know if I’ve reached that point yet.)

So it’s a song about being a nerd. Not surprising. I mainly wanted to write a song expressing a nerd’s excitement for going to a convention. Except I did a tiny subversion to this trope and made the joke that it wasn’t just your general nerdy ComiCon Battlestar Firefly Trek Wars thing. It was, in fact, a Teletubbies convention. Which brings me to the next point.

Basically, this entire song’s existence stems out of an inside joke. I was a Boy Scout (Troop 368 represent, yo) and in my patrol, my friends and I had a joke we’d make where if one of our patrol members (or even other troop members, especially those at a higher level) was absent from a meeting or a camping trip, we’d say that they were at the Teletubbies convention. I dunno if it sounds funny at all here, but we laughed about it then, and so I wrote this dumb song about it.

These days, I often criticize my older songs for lacking real emotional substance and simply being… well… *puts on a clown nose and honks it.* I poured most of my efforts into trying to make the songs funny and cram as many jokes in as I could, but forgot to allow the songs to have an emotional core. Which is fine, depending on the kind of song you’re going for, but I’m not so much about doing that anymore. But at the same time, I’m not saying a comedy song can’t have underlying emotions and deeper meanings. Jonathan Coulton has proven that wrong many times, and even Weird Al has a lot of songs that do that. But having said that, I think “Convention” is one of the first songs I’d written that does have a solid emotional core. The character in this song is genuinely excited about going to the convention, and he’s damn proud of it. Especially in the spoken word bridge section. I’m pretty happy with that. It shows the slightest bit of progress.

Needless to say, we’ve played this song at just about every convention show we’ve ever done. But these days, the song’s been retired, even at those. I’m not really sure if this song ever truly went over well, even with the extending lighter-waving breakdown ending we added later. When we played this song at regular venues, I think the audience was a bit confused and maybe didn’t realize the Teletubbies thing was a silly joke. Or maybe it was too silly for them to take in. And at conventions, I’m a little worried that the audiences may have thought this song was a backhanded thing, like we were making fun of con-goers right in their own environment. But it definitely isn’t that. Cons are fucking fun. I just thought the Teletubbies angle was funny. Maybe I’m reading too deeply into it. Maybe the ambivalent responses to this song were more because we sucked live than anything like that.

From a musical standpoint, I’m not too happy with it. The arrangement could definitely be better. Having it be an acoustic song is nice, and the accordion makes it sound a little TMBG-like, which is just fine. That piano line doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, though. The bass part isn’t anything fancy at all, mostly just root notes and things. I would have definitely made it bouncier now. And in general, I just feel like more stuff should be in there. But hey, I have a tendency to overproduce stuff, so what do I know? Kyle’s backing vocal was nice; I think this song may have been one of the first songs of ours where he actually sang. Now he sings on a lot of songs.

I should also mention that this recording of “Convention” is a re-record that we did during our freshman year of college. The original version of this song (which was pretty much the same, except without drums) was on an album we did in high school called “Advanced at Nothing.” It’s a terrible album, but like the EP this re-recording is on, it may be one of the least horrible things on an otherwise shitty product.

Kinda funny to think about, if we did this song today, it very well could have been about bronies. Hmm, brony song. Wouldn’t that be something?

“Convention” is available from our old EP “You Are What You Eat” which is on iTunes right here.