Update: Music, Music, Music! (Oh, and Also, The Backyardigans)

Uh, I Can Explain

Look, I know I’m not posting often. To quote “Never Turn Back” from Shadow the Hedgehog, I’ve got forty thousand pounds sittin’ on my back lately. Speaking of which, I’ve got the Recollected Cut’s intro illustrations to catch up on, I’m knee-deep in the ongoing revisions for both ElectroNuke and ElectroVerse: Batman, and Release 9 of the Sonic World fan game is being overhauled. Yeah, that all sounds inconsequential, but I’m… ahem… taking an advanced After Effects course at the same time, and lord knows my instructor who rarely stops talking to clarify confusing details without talking down to me doesn’t do much in the way of keeping me invested or motivated. I’m only sticking with it to (a) learn more professional editing practices and (b) earn a potential motion graphics certificate so I can get a job and move out, and even then, I’ve gotten plenty of offers based solely on my resume and portfolio.

Oh, and have I mentioned the people I’ve reached out to on apps like Hinge and Bumble are nearing three-digit figures, and still, only one has accepted before ghosting me? Or how about that I’ve received profile feedback or approval from people like my sister who’ve seen success on at least one of them? The autistic life is a fuckin’ confusing one, so I might as well get creative. That’s not even the last serving on my plate, though, but for the most part, the rest are too personal to get into.

Music: A Cruel and Shallow Money Trench

With that being said, let’s talk music, because I still don’t discuss it as much as I should. After all, most Bumble profiles I find seem like their top artists on Spotify—Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Bad Bunny, you name it—were copy-pasted directly between each other, and none of them match my preferences. For reference, I go the classic iTunes route instead of Spotify because (a) the former allows me to create my own albums with custom metadata and artwork; and (b) the latter’s infamous for fraud, stream dilution, fake artists, and minimal profits for actual artists—paying ninety-nine cents or a dollar twenty-five per song is both the old way to go and the right way to go. However, I did briefly sign up for and use Spotify just so the artists whose songs I own the most of can show up on my Bumble profile, but all that seems to accomplish is display the true distance between my musical taste and others’. The Fleet Foxes are playing as I’m writing this, by the way—much of whose material I’m just recalling for the first time—and if you don’t recognize them, well… that further stresses my point.

Of course, Pinback fits right into the camp of other music I’ve just discovered or rediscovered, but they’re definitely not alone. Let’s start with them, though, namely one notion in particular. See, since the “I Wish You Well” post, I’ve pointed out that, unlike popular bands like the Imagine Dragons, Pinback has no incentive not to release any material as they have to boost profits whenever possible (that’s somewhat ironic given they haven’t released a full studio album since 2012.) While that’s still the case for the most part, one EP is among their hardest to come by, and it’s one I fondly remember as having been played by my dad back in Exton, Pennsylvania whenever he’d work from home. Released in the same year as Summer in Abaddon, that EP was Too Many Shadows, named after the lyrics to “Fortress” from the former album. It contains original tracks like “Forced Motion”, “My Star”, and “Photograph Taken” as well as faster-tempo covers of “Non-Photo Blue” and “Fortress” from Summer in Abaddon, “Microtonic Wave” from Offcell, and “Boo” from Blue Screen Life (you may or may not have noticed from part three of the Recollected Cut post that the music associated with the Mist and Earth Dragon bosses from Episode Storybook has been switched to the “Microtonic Wave” cover.) Along with that, more of their music I remember from my Exton years has come to light: “The Hatenaughts of Melancholy Wall” from Autumn of the Seraphs (no, a hatenaught is not a real thing); “Offline P.K.” from Blue Screen Life; “Messenger”, “Byzantine”, and “Clemenceau” from Nautical Antiques; “Trainer” and “Manchuria” from Some Voices; “Victorious D” and “Offcell” from… well… Offcell; and “This Red Book” from Summer in Abaddon, which carries such a cryptic Recollected Cut vibe that I’ve almost considered adding it to the soundtrack.

As for “Offline P.K.” and the tracks from Nautical Antiques, I’ve realized just how much Pinback evokes surreal feelings from my past vacations on the east coast—namely those spent in York, Maine. Oddly, though, this brought relevance back to a memory that, despite having been spent with my cousins, the Jacobsons, on Redondo Beach (I recall having visited them and my uncle Tyler once on Venice Beach when I was, like, five), took place in an east-coast location I’ve never been able to nail down. As it turns out, this was more than likely just a dream, as the setting was a long, narrow bridge of sand that ended in a cul de sac while surrounded by absolutely nothing but ocean. One dream of this location saw, for some bizarre reason, my mom finding a severed human hand with robotic internal components in the sand, which she flipped around in her grip twice before screaming. A few weeks ago, I was able to find a coast on Nantucket that, at the right angle, captures this hazy “memory” rather well, although both my parents claim to have never been to Nantucket. On the subject of nightmarish(ly random) dreams, I’ve decided to rerelease my dreams post without all the illustrations just so you’re able to read it.

Now… back to Spotify, god forbid. Whereas I liked the couple of Wilco songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot I discovered in my limited period of playing my top artists-to-be, which I did while working on personal projects (the one album I’ve been hearing my whole life is Sky Blue Sky, which I very well may write a whole post about as every track included is a masterpiece), none of them were as significant as my Death Cab For Cutie discoveries. I vaguely remember hearing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot tracks like “Kamera” growing up, but not only is there a hint of nostalgia in tracks from the latter band’s album Transatlanticism like “Title and Registration”, “Tiny Vessels”, and “Transatlanticism”—for most of my life, only the sorrowfully soothing cover art rang a bell—but there’s also a unique resonance to hearing them nowadays, notably the overwhelming sense of loneliness they evoke.

Two other favorite catalogs of mine as of late are those of Depeche Mode and CCR, with the former being more overtly nostalgic than the latter. Whereas I simply recognized CCR hits like “Born on the Bayou”, “Down on the Corner”, “Travelin’ Band”, “Out My Back Door”, and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” playing on the Alexa at my day program, Depeche Mode began with my dad playing “Ghosts Again” in the car one day, having been released on their album Memento Mori as recently as 2023! This band really ramped up in the early ’80s, for reference, particularly their first hit “Just Can’t Get Enough” which I didn’t even recognize as being them when hearing it on Alexa—they essentially began as The Cars stuck in a bubblegum pop phase before transitioning into borderline emo cyberpunk techno-alternative. This, however, got me falling back in love with grimmer, more profound tracks like “Precious” and “World in My Eyes”, as well as learning to love Memento Mori numbers like “People Are Good” and “Caroline’s Monkey” (the former feels especially uncertain and relatable given everything happening in the world right now.) It’s actually inspired me to finalize two custom iTunes albums featuring these songs, both of which relate to my hypothetical ElectroNuke game, ElectroNuke: Triple Threat—those being Eli’s Playlist and Yoko’s Playlist. So far, the depictions of the titular protagonists on the cover art are the most accurate pieces I’ve illustrated to how I imagine them, not to mention how I envision them in animated series adaptations. “Precious” and “World in My Eyes” are on the former album for summing up Elias’s autism as well as his timid, fragile frame of mind while “People Are Good” and “Caroline’s Monkey” are listings on the second for embodying Yoko’s abhorrent treatment and survival instinct while living on the streets of San Francisco.

The rest of my new faves are only one track per band, but that certainly doesn’t mean they don’t resonate. I’ve come to associate my work-in-progress graphic novel Black Comet with orchestral, metal, and techno covers of “Heart-Shaped Box” for how the context can be altered to refer to proverbial wombs like the Black Comet, the Space Colony ARK, and the palace known as the Heart of Darkness; I fell head over heels again for “One Wrong Door” from the first album by A Silent Film, a band you almost surely haven’t heard of because my dad first saw them opening for another band; and the rocky dating app situation has gotten me connecting with Phil Collins’s “You Can’t Hurry Love” cover (I could write an entire post about songs that are unfairly associated with the bands covering them, like how you probably never knew “The Man Who Sold the World” was by David Bowie well before Nirvana.)

Meanwhile, the problem involving my next-door neighbor as previously mentioned here has made it impossible not to connect with “Next Door Neighbor Blues” by past The ElectroNuke blog alum Gary Clark Jr.; Alexa was daring enough to play “Cum On Feel the Noize” by Quiet Riot at the same place and time as Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” (it was only then that I realized who and what Dad was channeling when he’d sing “his name is Sammy, he is a showgirl” back in Exton); my Premiere Pro and After Effects classes just so happened to involve editing a cover performance of “Before You Accuse Me” by Eric Clapton as well as CCR, which I’ve formed another personal link to the next-door neighbor situation; for the first time, it’s clear to me that the version of “Close to Me” by The Cure that Dad would play on the electric base in Exton, and therefore the most nostalgic one for me, is the one without trumpets from The Head on the Wall; and Boy & Bear, an Australian indie-folk band not unlike the Fleet Foxes—especially in the vocal department—has me wrapped around their fingers once more with “Feeding Line” thanks to several tracks from Harlequin Dream sounding nostalgic despite not being nostalgic. Other than that? Well, one heartbreaking lo-fi number utilized by YouTubers like Blameitonjorge and Cadaber, both of whom I watch at an ever-decreasing frequency, turns out to be “Out of Step” by Amaranth Cove, whose similar royalty-free track “For a Moment” has been used by the former content creator as well as in a Max Payne 3 analysis presentation I submitted for my UMass Boston fiction course.

Lost Media: To Muppet Babies or Not to Muppet Babies?

You can pin all the lost anime updates on the wiki homepage you want—it’s not gonna loosen my interest in lost media. Or maybe it will, considering I just started watching the Nickelodeon exposé series Quiet on Set, somehow took notice of the JoJo (no, not JoJo Rabbit) tee on an All That alum, and came damn near close to losing all focus out of discomfort. Between that and one holographic harpy named Miku, I’m forever cursed to recognize anime things I never asked to recognize. Nonetheless, the series still has me hooked, as do a few lost media mysteries not yet mentioned here. One example surrounds The Day the Clown Cried, quite possibly the most sought-after lost film in history, as its only known uncut reel was recently sold off to a private collector—the seller, who’d smuggled the reel years prior, claimed he was passing it onto the next generation, which is paradoxical as his choice to sell it may only serve to keep it hidden away from said generation. Although Jerry Lewis, who directed and starred in it, lived the rest of his life more ashamed of it than even its harshest critics at the time, I watched the partial restoration with an open mind after first hearing of this development, and I was shocked by how tasteful and compelling it turned out to be—Lewis’s dispirited, soft-spoken performance was humble and genuine; even moments of levity like his antics for the children at the camps weren’t treated as humorous; and the ending was truly gut-wrenching in a way that hit hard without feeling gratuitous or insensitive. I can only suggest that the subject matter was simply too raw for audiences so soon after World War II ended.

Well, that’s a bit of a downer given the heading, so aside from Shel Silverstein’s mostly lost adult studio recordings dubbed the “Fuck ‘Em” demos—for the record, I was mildly obsessed with picture books of his like Runny Babbit as a kid—I can’t help but dump on myself over not taking interest in one uniquely strange piece of media sooner. Between weird and wonderful Nick Jr., Noggin, and Sprout shows from my childhood like Pingu and Oobi, I also had The Wonder Pets and, most importantly given the way it’s been branded into my family’s minds, The Backyardigans. This told the story of friends Pablo, Tyrone, Austin, Tasha, and Uniqua creating imaginary scenarios in their backyard, and songs from the first episode like “Riding the Range”, “There’s an Echo in This Canyon”, and “Cowgirls, Cowboys” are long-running inside jokes of my family’s for… some reason. It was a cute show, all things considered, but the premise was… ahem… less than original, and that’s part of what makes its unaired pilot so fascinating. First visualized as a live-action series titled Me and My Friends, it featured clearer morals, full-body suits with animatronic faces, a trio of later-unused meerkat characters, and no imagination sequences. Funny enough, original creator Janice Burgess—sadly, she’s no longer with us—based it off her and her friends’ backyard antics when they were growing up in Pennsylvania, so my past with the final show feels rather prophetic. Regardless, the show was only picked up after being switched from live-action to CGI, and I will admit, the years-long lack of available footage plus the uncanny look of the costumes gave it this bizarre, uh… creep factor, I guess you could say.

Then, this year happened, and all of a sudden, the current state of things doesn’t feel entirely shit. The pilot surfaced online, and although it was soon taken down, it has a number of mirrors including a Google Drive link. Now, when I first heard about the pilot (I should’ve been light years more enthralled by it than I was, but to be fair, I am twenty-five), it didn’t look like there was any articulation in the suits’ faces, so the lack of movement combined with the DIY quality of the cardboard set made it as unnerving to me as it was to everyone else… until I shared it in my family group chat, which was followed by an inevitable sing-a-long and my decision to watch the Google Drive upload. While, yes, it was about as corny as the final show, I found myself impressed by the quality and complexity of the facial mechanics which, along with the puppeteering of the meerkats, brought a very pleasant and Henson-y charm to it. The plot sees everyone but Austin, who isn’t present, preparing to play flag tag, which seems to entail shuffling around aimlessly with pennants glued to cardboard tubes like the actors can’t see under the suits. Pablo, who’s actually better characterized than in the final series as being prone to panic and mistakes, has trouble waiting and decides to play with the flags before the glue has dried, causing them all to fly off their poles when everyone starts playing. Uniqua, who Burgess referred to as a reflection of herself as a child, viciously shames Pablo like a little bitch before running off and refusing to talk, but in the end, he learns to find ways to pass the time and make waiting easier to manage.

I’m the only living human who kind of prefers this version of the show, aren’t I? Then again, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the mystical quality it once carried was part of the intrigue, so honestly? I hope we don’t hear anything else about it. I really do.