Demo Dump: "Operator Error"

What the song looked like moments after birth 👼🏼

Hey, gang! Keith, here. Look, our hope for this substack is that it’ll be a place where we can get real with one another. No pageantry, no pretense. We want it to be a space in which we can get to know one another, warts and all, if we had warts or blemishes or whatever.  Like, if we did have warts, we’d put them right out front, here! It won’t be a forum in which we’ll only show you photos of ourselves airbrushed and filtered into unrecognizability. We’ll give you the behind-the-scenes stuff; like this candid photo from the Lobes photo shoot, snapped while we casually waited for wardrobe to finish steaming our shirts.

Likewise, we don’t want to share with  you, our inner circle, only the manicured and spit-polished final versions of our music. You, along with the rest of the world, will soon be hearing the mixed and mastered songs from Lobes everywhere — radio, streaming, TUMS commercials (just ironing out the last details of the contract, fingers crossed). We want you to hear the unvarnished us in these songs — the bum notes, the scratch vocals, the harebrained, dead-end creative missteps. In that spirit, we offer this, the original demo of Operator Error, the first single from Lobes. 

So, sure: the vocals are pitchy, the lyrics are barely half-there, and the intro is overlong, but, crud, this is a good version. This is a *competitive* version! And do you know why? There’s a guitar solo. It busts in there, snorting and squealing and whipping around like a swamp boar with a python clamped onto its hindquarters. I do love the bridge we eventually landed on, which is elegant and lovely and takes the song on a 20-second detour into blissful narcosis. This demo’s solo, on the other hand, is an all-out fight for survival, tusk-vs-fang in thigh-deep, brackish slough.  In this battle, though, everybody wins. Chris, any thoughts?

Chris: Yeah, part of me does miss that original bridge, which was like two amphetamine-crazed zombies fist-fighting over a bag of pennies, but boy, the FINAL bridge… hubba hubba. And yeah, super-glad you wrote lyrics for the second verse — repeating verses is the act of a drugged bear. (So much animal metaphor in the this podcast!)

There’s nothing I especially want back, but I’d like to play another version of the song from further along in the process — it has a couple of fun bits. I’m going to start it in verse 2. Right off the bat you’ll hear that we had improved the drum sound, and then you’re treated to this pretty fierce Moog sound that we had in there for a minute — very Weezer, and in fact the part that plays under the vocal is uncomfortably close to a Weezer part I can’t recall at the moment. After that you get some big Killers-sounding Juno synth on the chorus, and then on the bridge, a really prevalent bendy sine synth (which I actually kind of do miss — it’s more tucked in our final mix, and with less vibrato). And lastly, a drum dropout at the top of the outro chorus. I still really dig that, but I think you were right to exercise a veto in favor of keeping momentum. Take a listen…

Tough. Stuff.

Thanks for listening, reading, and COVERING YOUR PHONE IN JELLY RIGHT NOW BEFORE YOU THINK ABOUT IT!!!!!!

Hey, did I get anybody? Tell us in the comments if you did as commanded and jellied your phone! In fact, a free one year subscription goes to anyone who jellied their phone and provides a photo with proof of date (today’s newspaper will do fine).

Okay, we’ll be back this weekend with… SOMETHING. Not sure what yet. Requests? You surely know where to put ‘em.

L8r sk8rs,

Keith & Chris

FinalFacts™️: Did you see the video in which we demean the value of saxophone as an instrument? It’s right here. Oh, and we’re re-skinning our website *as I type this.* Wonder if it’ll be up by the time this email goes out…?