Sockpuppet Releases.

Back in the late 90s I had a quite vivid dream about an impossible love that could not exist, and I wrote the first version of the lyrics for this song, and had a vague idea for the chords.

In either late December 2000 or early January 2001, I was visiting my parents during winter break from grad school and noticed that a bunch of my favorite webcomics were all part of what was called the Dumbrella collective. I decided to poke around on the main Dumbrella website, and I noticed a thing on it called “Song Fight!,” which was a songwriting contest where the person running it, Narbotic, would invite his friends to make songs for a single title, as a continuation from his own website where he’d take random title suggestions and make weird little songs for them.

There was also an announcement that the next title, Zero to Phantom, would be open to anyone to submit to the title.

I had absolutely no ideas for it.

But the next title to go up, I LOVE YOU, reminded me of the song I’d written a few years before, and I decided to dust it off. I figured that it’d make a perfect guitar song.

The problem is, I only barely knew a couple of chords, and I didn’t have a guitar. At this point nearly all of my music production had been weird chiptunes.

So I went to a pawn shop and paid too much for some broken and dusty piece of crap, and figured out a few more chords, and I didn’t have a pick so I sanded down a chunk of a broken CD-R to make one, and I tried to record the song.

Unfortunately, I did not know how to actually record live audio, and I didn’t have the finger strength or stamina to even play through the whole song anyway.

So, I sampled all of the chords I knew and a couple of little riffs, loaded them up into Impulse Tracker, and tried sequencing the chords together. Then I recorded my vocals and chopped them up into samples and loaded them up into Impulse Tracker too, and then kinda-sorta assembled things together.

At the time, I didn’t know how to sing, either. I also hadn’t worked out the rhythm of the vocals and just kind of figured it out as I went.

The song was an absolute mess. But I submitted it to Song Fight! anyway, and the reaction was… adequate enough that it inspired me to keep going, and this started my process of slowly building up a bunch of skills for songwriting, guitar playing, recording, singing, and so much more.

This isn’t the first song I ever wrote, but it is ultimately the one that started me on my journey as a musician.