Tag Archives: Two Lines

Usual Rubbish

Refried show.

Hey, Matt .. what was that joke about the wooden balls again? Oh, right. Nah … it doesn’t work very well without the visual. Scratch that.

Oh, hello. We are, of course, working on the next installment of our podcast. It’s like the freaking Forbin Project, for chrissake. Takes us months to write the sucker, record it, edit it, compose and record songs, cut it all together, upload it, then collapse in a heap. (That last part actually happens kind of quickly.) Sometimes you want to just shout, “Enough!”, throw up your hands and walk away. Mic drop! But no, my friends, no … the show must go on.

That said, well … it HAS been kind of a long time. So we dropped another installment of our Ned Trek podcast – that’s the show that is just Ned Trek and no random jabbering between me and my brother. This month’s installment is extracted from one of last year’s THIS IS BIG GREEN episodes, Ned Trek 23: Mitt’s Brain. Based on the Spock’s Brain episode of classic Star Trek, it’s full of ridiculous plot departures and snarky portrayals of neocon freak bastards. Just the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from a Big Green podcast. On top of all that, there are 6 original Big Green songs in the mix, not available in Och, these cumberbunds are a wee bit tight.stores or on any album (yet). I could tell you what time code numbers they appear at in the show, but then you would just skip the whole play or simply laugh at my presumption, so I’ll forgo that.

The songs are, well, some of my favorites from the last year or so. I’d say number one in my book is “Two Lines”, a song sung by Lt. Sulu describing his artistic angst over being limited to two-line speeches throughout the entire three-year run of classic Star Trek. The chorus commandeers some of these two-line speeches to communicate Sulu’s despair:

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 hold
Captain, the controls are frozen
manual override is completely out
Aye, sir, I’ve been trying
but my shields are down and I cannot last

Then there’s a song about a yellow submarine. Actually not – there is one Pearle song called “Send in Some Advisers” which, well … the name pretty much says it. Anywho, the show it totally refried, so enjoy it … a second time.

Usual Rubbish

Song mill.

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 …. !

Forgot that.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 hold

Captain, 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.