Liz and I have been enjoying writing parody lyrics, recording them to old karaoke tracks, and then making a music video to go along with them.
There's nothing like knowing that you've inspire smiles and laughter from others.
We'd only done it once, but it came from a half dozen ideas we'd been kicking around during quarantine.
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| "Stuck in the Middle with You" Parody |
So we looked for a duet that we could do.
One of my favorite all-time duets is "Islands in the Stream" written by the Bee Gees but made famous by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.
We toyed with the lyrics, wanting to tell the tale of a couple that learns how to share their home workspace, and their often struggling home internet connection.
It was, to us, a nice parallel to the previous parody we'd done "Stuck in This House With You" where a couple comes to terms with being isolated together. Whereas that one was about personal relationships, this new parody would be about discovering that same respect for the other person's new "work from home" life.
The song was titled "Sharing Broadband Streams."
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| Sharing Broadband Streams stills from video |
We recorded it a few weekends ago, but we couldn't get over the fact that there were parts of the song that, no matter how many times we tried to re-record it (and trust me, we re-recorded it dozens and dozens of times), we just couldn't get it.
I tried to do some audio enhancement to adjust the lyrical tracks, to at least try to slightly mask my off-key caterwauling, but not even auto-tune programs could resurrect this "The Singing Dead."
Liz wanted to scrap the entire project.
She is a perfectionist. I take more of a "it's good enough, let's throw it out there and see if it sticks" kind of guy.
We clashed creatively. As we do. I relented.
I was frustrated; because I felt the song was pretty good. (And by that, I meant, the parody lyrics were pretty good. The singing - well, it was my singing after all, it almost approached what one might say "not too nauseating.")
But then Liz came up with an idea. A brilliant idea.
She said that there were parts of the main chorus that weren't that bad. She wondered if we could use that, and also create a few other songs and present them together in a medley format.
As we brainstormed further, the idea of doing a K-Tel spoof commercial arose. We must have watched about twenty minutes of those hokey commercials from the 1970s and 1980s.
Then we set about recording the different tracks, and Liz began scripting out how the corresponding video would work.
We came up with Kay-Tell (a fake imprint based on the original) and a compilation album called STILL STUCK, STILL WITH YOU, STILL IN THIS HOUSE.
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| Kay-Tell Presents: Still Stuck, Still with You, Still in this House |
It's something that turned out not that bad, in my humble opinion.
I suppose the lesson in this creative exercise is that I had initially been wasting energy being frustrated with the broken egg yolks I had when I'd planned on preparing a dish of over easy fried eggs. It was difficult for me to see past that, until Liz, looking at those eggs, looked around the kitchen for a few other things to throw into the dish, to turn it into a marvelous omelette.
Hope that you enjoy this omelette, and also that the lesson inspires you to think to look around your own kitchen for how you might be able to do the same thing with your own creative projects.
(Oh, and the original title for this used the term "broken egg yokes" because I was trying to layer in a play on words. Yoke as in an alternative term for a joke. But then I changed it because I was worried the mis-spelling might be too confusing.)
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