Thing a Week 8 – Sibling Rivalry
This week, a little laptop music. I’ve been in airplanes and hotels all week, so everything had to happen inside my computer, which made for an interesting challenge. The vocal track is from some voice over work a friend of mine did for a TV show, cut up and arranged in Ableton Live. I added some loops, recorded a little guitar, and mixed it all on my Plantronics USB headset (all you audio engineers out there are cringing right now). I must tell you, for most of this week I despaired of getting to a place where this was in any way interesting. Then somehow in the last 24 hours the vocal track started to be “about” something, though I can’t say what. Sisters. Suspicious, fighting sisters. And someone goes to a mall.
Here is the song: Sibling Rivalry
November 4th, 2005 at 9:57 am
Your friend sounds a bit like Brent Spiner….
November 4th, 2005 at 10:24 am
First Brookline, now Brooklyn! Will Brookhaven be next?
November 4th, 2005 at 10:55 am
Fun! Nice work under challenging circumstances. Not as easy to sing along with as the last couple “angry” songs (which were both great) – but there’s the teasing hint of a story there . . .
November 6th, 2005 at 8:55 am
I live in Brookline, and found your song suprisingly accurate, and funny. How do you know of Brookline?
November 6th, 2005 at 11:51 am
Now here’s a song I can dance to! How very DJ Shadow of you. Hope your Brookline gig went swimmingly.
Susan
November 6th, 2005 at 4:41 pm
Gabriela: I went to college with a Brookliner and then I married one. I wrote that song for a Little Gray Books lecture about Brookline (which we actually just re-performed in Brookline this last weekend. I have become one of the pod people…
Susan: thanks dude.
November 7th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Married?!
November 7th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
I knew it-your wife was the bionically altered character in “Better”, right?
November 8th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
jp3z: Did you think the child was a result of parthenogenesis? (Although with Jc, the choices abound — cloning, monkeys, robot child minions…)
November 9th, 2005 at 6:22 am
Yes, sorry ladies, there’s a wife. You will have to find another unemployed manchild with a beard. Did I mention she is a robot wife?
November 10th, 2005 at 4:45 pm
I’m not hearing some o the lyrics in an entirely new light, particularly “you’re forver married to Brookline”.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:33 am
This track makes me think of The Apprentice or some other challenging “reality” show.
January 31st, 2006 at 7:49 am
[...] Derek sends me these links, thus demonstrating that there is some kind of creepy resonance thing happening with sisters named Joan and Jane – of course you remember Thing a Week 8. Gotta love Google (unless you are Chinese). [...]
April 10th, 2006 at 1:35 am
Great song! But please, check out the lyrics page.
July 29th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
As in, the lyrics page link from the Songs page is broken.
October 11th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Just listened to this for the millionth time, but this time I heard it differently. For some reason I started picturing a video for this where Jane and Joan aren’t just sisters, they’re assassins sent to kill each other. It fits well enough that I’d love to see it on JoCoPro sometime…
Might just be something I ate, too.
November 13th, 2006 at 12:34 am
OK, so I’ve been trying to figure out where the voice over came from… all I can imagine is some reality-type show, about two sisters in some sort of contest – making weird stuff, playing tennis, and… god knows what. So JoCo, I gotta know – just where did the voice over for this come from?!!
January 21st, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I still haven’t figured out where the VO came from, but I’m pretty sure it’s David Guion’s voice.
March 17th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Rach: I can see where you’re coming from on that. He does. In fact, I can hear in my mind a line where Data from ST:TNG uses the exact same inflection pattern as in “Jane and Joan need a time-out”. I can’t remember his words, though. Weird.
March 17th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Sorry for double-posting, but I just listened to the voice a bit harder, and it doesn’t sound like Spiner if you pay attention to the timbre. Brent’s voice has a lighter sound to it; this guy’s is too deep. It’s definitely a striking first-listen resemblance, though.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:23 am
I know I’m late to the party here, but this tune kinda has a Lemon Jelly feel to it. I like it a lot, especially after reading this post about your constraints when creating it.
June 19th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
[...] but cried out Jane’s name in the bedroom this one time. This is especially awkward because Joan and Jane are sisters. And in watching the conversations between Bob and Jane, he finds out that Bob’s been [...]
April 8th, 2009 at 7:59 am
To me, this spoofs reality TV with cliches about needing a time out and rigged scavenger hunts where the teams find totally different things in the same location.
My new office catch phrase is definitely going to be “Joan and Jane need a time out.”
June 9th, 2009 at 10:08 am
NOOO! You’re beard is the best one out there though :/.