I don't know why, but this song reminds me of Sly and The Family Stone's It's A Family Affair. It's a real bummer lyrically, but the music moves me, containing the slightest sliver of mellow hope. I'm really digging having an electric piano, although my favorite part of this song is when the dual guitars kick in. It's a real gut punch, a shock to the system (insert favorite cliche).
A Poem For Napoleon
We took you from the Colerain SPCA
A little short puppy
With a tattoo
Where your balls used to be.
The first time you met Lily,
You nipped her cheek so much that it bled.
In Cincinnati, you would sit on the armrest of the couch,
Legs spread out like a reptile,
Nose stuck beneath the blinds
To bark at any passersby you saw.
Prone to ear infections
Due to your hairy Wookiee feet,
You would growl and snap
Whenever I tried to clean your ears.
Your nicknames were the following:
Pupperton-maximus,
Po-Po,
Wubus,
And wubbydoodle.
When they put you under at the vet
To clean your ears,
You clamped your tiny jaws
Onto a vet-tech's finger.
In your old age, you mellowed
and mostly kept around my heels
when I was in the kitchen.
Blind and deaf, you wandered out of the yard
Just last week to be picked up
By two older ladies
Who took you
To David's vet clinic in Rising Sun.
You passed on the cool floors of the kitchen
Where you preferred to lay.
I buried you at the farm
Next to Lily
Your packmate
And true love.
I will miss your little short feet,
Your floppy ears,
Your shaggy coat,
And The way you rested your head
Chin jutting outward.
Little old man,
Last of the pack,
Vestige of my youth,
My first dog.
Goodbye.
A Theme Park Mistress classic, Come With A Drink dates back to 2010. A moody lamentation for alcohol and direction in the winter gloom, this version is mostly piano driven, as opposed to the original, which relied on rough, jangling guitars.
I am very late to the party, for Disco Elysium is already famous for being a modern classic of RPG genre, and so my review, coming years after its release, has little reason to exist other than to tell you, my hypothetical reader, what I think of it. Quite simply, it's a marvelous game. A role-playing experience with heavy adventure game roots (you will spend all of your time reading, listening, pointing, and clicking) Disco Elysium is about an alcoholic police detective who awakens in a hotel room with no memory of his self or past life. After a few conversations in the Whirling Rags (your hotel), you discover a personal path of desolation and destruction that points to one hell of a night. Your detective was sent to the ruined city of Revachol, a post-war ghetto still suffering from a war that happened almost fifty years ago between the Communists and the Loyalist factions, to solve the murder of a hanged mercenary. In the present Revochal is controlled by the Coalition, a neoliberal government that adheres to a centrist philosophy the game calls Moralism. Politics and political ideologies are very relevant to Disco Elysium, but the game's main theme is the heavy burden of the past. Your detective is unable to recover from a broken relationship; similarly, Revochal cannot transcend its history of civil war and conquest. The disco dancer in the hotel whom you soon discover is very important to the case is running from past transgressions, and the murderer, without revealing too much, is a former deserter who cannot let go of a failed revolution. I played the detective as an empath and a physical being, the four main attributes being Intellect, Psyche, Motorics, and Physique, with six secondary skills being associated with those four. You'll have to pass various skill checks during lengthy conversations, and what skills you choose are important, for Disco Elysium is a game almost entirely about talking. Said conversations are fully-voiced and well-acted, and I often found myself listening to many of them instead of hurriedly clicking past to the next option. The dialogue is poetic and very well-written; here's a little sample from the end of the game, when you're speaking to a sentient cryptid that seems to have a completely alien perspective.
"I am the end of a narrow tunnel. Weightless. So light it only feels like "something" to be me. In truth--perhaps I'm nothing? I certainly do not have a soul. And if I did, it would never ache."
Disco Elysium's main designer is Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, and the game is based on the same setting as his novel Sacred and Terrible Air. According to Wikipedia, Kurvitz is a communist, and the history of Disco Elysium is dependent on Marxist theory. Class warfare, corrupt Union bosses, citizens taking the law into their own hands, governing forces attempting to hold what little is left together--this is a dense stew that doesn't necessarily point the player in the direction of the Comrade, although my cop managed reconcile his hustler drive with his occasional support of communist socio-economics. These ideologies can be researched and equipped under Thoughts, and they provide gameplay bonuses, as well as penalties. Thoughts such as Hobo-cop are nestled right next to Traditionalism and Radical Feminist. Disco Elysium wants you to be as invested in your political ideologies as your character's bizarre quirks and addictions.
My only real criticism of the game is there are a couple of skill checks that'll prevent your progress unless you increase them. One is pretty early; you encounter a racist Union henchman named Measurehead that'll kick your ass unless you've invested heavily in the Physical Instrument skill. You can steal a Union card and bypass him, if you see it--I didn't, and had to do other quests until I level up the aforementioned skill enough to put the behemoth in his place. I also had to reload a save because I progress locked myself on the first night by not having enough cash to pay for my hotel room, which was a pain, because I had to redo several quests, which meant clicking through a lot of dialogue that I'd already read.
Minor quibbles aside, Disco Elysium is a classic RPG adventure, and highly recommended to anyone who enjoys unconventional, well-written games. It's a true piece of art and up there with Baldur's Gate 3 as one of the best examples of the genre I've played.
A song about being your own savior (happy Easter!) done on my Yamaha piano while using Reason for bass and drum sounds. The mean streets of Aurora, Indiana are filmed in passing. What more is there to say? I enjoyed making this one.
A wise man once said to me
"Son, when you see two birds
flying through the air
and a hawk swoops down
and seizes one of them,
do not waste time thinking
about the one who became
a meal."
I don't trust men
who call themselves wise.
Is it wise to discard the fate
of the doomed?
Will their plight
drown us in misery?
It is hard not to drown now
floundering as we are
the churning waters lapping
against our outstretched arms.
The time of change is often
the time of dying
And what bird could we be?
Will you soar tomorrow
or have your bones cracked
by curved talons?
Yes, you cannot think about it
but in the dark of the early morn
my mind wanders to the ditch
and lingers in the cold caverns
where bodies become one
with the earth.
Maybe that bird deserved it.
Maybe he flew too high
or was seized by a strange impulse,
a manic stupidity,
and he danced for the hawk
and dared him to come and see
if his wings were faster,
if his talons were as sharp
as the wise folk said.
You're right, wise man.
I can't cry for him
or me
or anyone who dares death
with a reckless abandon.
Sometimes we don't deserve
any pity for the things we do.
A solo piano piece in D that features modulation from D Melodic Major (D major with a flatted 6th) to D Lydian in 3/4 time. One of the prettier pieces of music I've ever written.
Welcome to Moron Town, where we manufacture the finest poo-poo and refined pee-pee in the world. Here in Moron Town, you get a square deal, because we're all out of other shapes, and to be quite honest, we don't know any others at this point. The Poo-Poo King dismantled the Department of Education, and now instead of learning mathematics and verbal skills, our kids work in the poop factory, shoveling shit into square boxes to distribute amongst ourselves.
We used to have a vibrant economy, mostly serviced based. We had schools and hotels and office buildings. There were public parks and paved roads and government services. But then we had an election, and the Poo-Poo King won on a platform of Bring the Poo-Poo Back Again. At one time in our history, Moron Town was a global leader in manure distribution. Many of our citizens worked in this field, but global trade agreements decimated our poo-poo industry. Our economy changed, and although we became much wealthier due to all the cheap goods we purchased from other countries, many people lost their jobs in the poo sector. There was a lot of resentment on the rural outskirts of Moron Town, and that resentment, along with fears of The Woke Mind-Virus, propelled the Poo-Poo King into office.
Unfortunately, the Poo-Poo King wasn't a very smart man. Despite running on a platform of Bring The Poo-Poo Back Again, many people were surprised when the Poo-Poo King put a tax on anything that wasn't poo-poo. Everything became much more expensive. All of a sudden, everybody became much poorer, not just because of the tariffs, but also because our non-poo-poo industries went out of business. Turns out that when you switch to a poo-poo based economy, anything that's not poop becomes really expensive. Our teachers, doctors, CEOs, service workers, and just about everybody else were soon shoveling shit in the poo-poo factory. Other countries heavily tariffed our poo-poo, so we started refining piss in an attempt to diversify, but nobody wants to buy our pee, and our poo-poo is unwanted as well. So now we sell poo-poo and pee-pee to ourselves, and everybody is dumb and poor as shit.
The Poo-Poo King doesn't care. He sits upon his throne of shit and pisses on anybody that approaches. The members of his political party (The GOP--Grand Old Poop Party) grovel on their knees and lap it up. They have poop in their brains and they can't stand up to the Poo-Poo King, because they slip on the piss. So we are stuck with our poo-poo based economy, despite everyone not really digging all the shit and piss.
I hear what you're saying. "Why did you guys vote for the Poo-Poo King, when Bring the Poo Back Again was such a stupid platform?" Well, buddy, this is Moron Town. We're all a bunch of morons. We do shit, and ask questions later. By the way, how are you enjoying your plate of poo-poo? Would you like some pee-pee with that?
What is this song? I wrote it in C but then transposed it to B Flat to better match my voice. Then I had a hell of a time singing the 3/4 part, so maybe I should have left it in C? I dunno. It's not really like anything I've ever done before, which is good. You gotta evolve as an artist. At least, that's what they tell me. I don't know who "they" is.
It's the Royal Road, baby! Sure, J-Pop might have abused the hell out of this chord progression, but I haven't used it much! Took my new piano out for a spin. The guitars were all played on my cheap Fender acoustic; for the dueling solos, I ran them through Reason and distorted them. I like the concept of change. Change is good, because change is life. To resist change is to be destroyed. Change and adapt. I hath begun my career as a motivational speaker/life-coach. Perhaps I can do better than George Costanza.
Do you want to move?
Do you want to pick through your belongings
Pack it all up
and start again down the street?
This house is my home
Where I had my children
Where we scrapped ice off the walls
And learned to have space.
When I sleep at night
I worry about leaving my past
And all the memories we made here.
But shouldn't we change?
If we fight against the current
We drown and sink beneath the surface
There is no way to add to a person
without embracing the difference
between the past and the present.
I know that nothing will ever stay the same
Life is not a picture
A painting
A screenshot
Or a photo.
Last night I had a dream
of a different woman and I
doing homework
In another home
With another child.
What is this strange reality?
A different universe?
An omen?
Or a simple flight of fancy?
I don't know
But maybe
it is okay
To move.
I don't know why, but this song reminds me of Sly and The Family Stone's It's A Family Affair. It's a real bummer lyricall...
