What the hell. Is that the number of songs? Are you freaking kidding me? Just looking at it is freaking exhausting. All those parts! What the …. !
Oh, hello. I’m pretending to just notice you, there on the other side of this transparent screen that separates us. Hoo-boy, well … you’ve caught us in the middle of an analysis of our song inventory. Little hard to keep close track of this stuff. We just write ’em, track ’em, and stack ’em. Never take the time to count them, for chrissake. Before you know it, they’re cluttering up the closets, over-stuffing all of the dresser drawers, spilling out into the hallway, and god knows what. Bloody nuisance!
So, on Matt’s insistence (slave driver!), we’ve taken to inventorying them, starting with the most recent examples and working backward. What’s first? Well, our Ned Trek songs, of course. Stacks of them. Our February episode of Ned Trek included no less than six new songs, including a number by Mr. Sulu himself: “Two Lines”. It’s a kind of Sulu-esque lament about the crappy little speeches he was given in the original Star Trek series, typically … well … two lines long. Appropriately, the chorus is made up of two-line parts George Takei uttered at various points in his tenure as navigator on the Enterprise:
Captain, the controls are frozen
the helm won’t respond; we’re being pulled inside
Aye, aye, my career is broken
like a giant hand has me in its holdCaptain, the controls are frozen
manual override is completely out
Aye, sir, I’ve been trying
but my shields are down and I cannot last
That’s about the size of it. So there’s maybe forty of these now recorded and mixed. We’ve got another six in the oven for the next episode of Ned Trek. One of the more productive periods of songwriting in Big Green history, not that quantity is any substitute for quality. Still, we like to think that, in counting them, we are at least handling the quantity part of the issue. Or maybe we’ve just got way too much time on our hands.
Matt and I are putting the finishing touches on the next batch of Ned Trek songs. When I say “finishing touches”, I mean “adding essential musical elements without which the songs would be virtually unlistenable.” Details, details. In any case, we have six (or is it seven?) numbers under construction, some of which border on the blasphemous, others tinkering with long-held practices of civilized peoples, still others merely dabbling in the art of giving grave offense. A controversial collection? Depends on your point of view.
I guess I could blame our slowness on the cold, like everyone else, but hell, we were born into this frozen hellscape, raised in its nurturing embrace, and will likely finish out our days frozen to the ground from whence we rose. In other words, yeah, hell … it’s sure cold outside!