Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Part 4: "Somethng, Something" in French

Hello again fellow survivors. It’s been a long while. Sorry. It’s partly because of me being a busy with my current life situation and partly because I had been working on my other blog. I’ll try to resume regular work here.

2008 was yet another non-starter year for Zombie Apocalypse NOW! though compared to the last two years it was the height of success. In a lot of ways it was an extremely frustrating time (As we’ll soon get into) but the silver lining is that I wrote a ton of new songs. Let’s talk a bit about a few of them.

ZAN,  ill-equipped as always.  Possibly playing "Sellout" for the first time
Sellout: Easily one of our most popular and well liked song. It’s the one that people come up to me after shows and compliment me on the most. Toman from our good friends The Common Good loves the song so much that he always tries to get us to let him sing on stage with us whenever our two bands play together. The content of the song is a bit of a mystery due to the no-so-clear lyrics but a lot of people have assumed that it’s a commentary about the state of music these days and bands that have “sold out.” In reality I actually wrote the song about…a girl (WHAAAT?!). And a real girl too, not like Justice Girl where the whole story is obviously fictional. Long story short in early 2008 I met a beautiful girl who I almost immediately fell for but I could never actually pursue her due to many, many hurdles that popped up over the next year not the least of which being that TWO of my best friends “saw her first”. I wrote this song as a way of getting over her, which by the way hasn’t really worked yet. But writing about my “feelings” was lame so as a joke I purposely wrote a bass line that was extremely simple, a repetitive verse and a chorus intentionally poppy and imitable and meant to garner a specific reaction: a catchy tune that is hard to get out of your head, like something you might hear on the radio, that forces you to happily sing along to. Upon hearing the joke Mike Zupke suggested we call it “Sellout” due to its poppy nature. So yeah, no commentary there. Incidentally I laugh every time someone tells me they love the song as it means they fell into my trap (Mwahahaha) but even so it’s one of my favorite songs to play.

More after the jump.