October Project #2: Skeleton!

Hey there!

I am in disbelief that I have a new song to share with you all today. I woke up Sunday and sat on my porch overlooking the beautiful fall scenery and contemplated what the topic for this week's song should be. I meandered for a while before I came up with the concept of a terminally ill patient losing it - not at his diagnosis, but at a picture of his skeleton. I thought it could be really funny but I quickly got hung up on the logistics of finding a convincing doctor, a doctor's office, and an x-ray machine. I started writing variations of the first few lines but ended up putting it on ice early afternoon.

That evening, I remembered that I have close family friends who are chiropractors and wondered if I could weasel my way into one of their offices after hours. This was enough to get me to finish writing the song (even though I never heard back from them). 

I truly spent most of my time writing this song having no idea how I would be able to convincingly shoot it. I was especially sweating it because I was so happy with how the Hellmo video turned out. I didn't want to drop the ball on song #2 and drastically lower the bar. The first piece of the puzzle was (Cowboy) Jon having the week off because of fall break. The doctor was in!

The next objective: I needed to get my hands on some x-rays. I reached out to my sister-in-law, who is a nurse, feeling fairly certain that it is probably illegal to take home other peoples' x-rays. But who knows, maybe there is a room full of dead peoples x-rays that the hospital is dying to get rid of. Turns out, x-rays are done digitally these days. The October Project scores again! All I needed was an iPad and some google images.

Final and biggest hurdle, I needed a doctor's office. I knew this would be extremely difficult to come by and even trickier to fake. Somewhere along the way, the scene where Walter White learns that he has cancer (from the Breaking Bad pilot) popped into my head. It's just three shots of a desk. One shot facing Walter, one shot facing the doctor, and another with both on each side. I have a desk!

I wrote and recorded most of the song on Monday. I had a hard time landing on a chord progression for the chorus that I was happy with. I wrote main riff that I ended up using on a synth bass and it gave the song a new wave of energy for me. on its own, it reminded me a little bit of the Elon Musk as a Grimes song I wrote for Super Deluxe. I hit a dead end after the chorus and was feeling very deflated about this entire project. I couldn't see a pathway to being satisfied with this song within the parameters I set, let alone two more songs afterwards. I heavily debated whether I should go to bed and revisit with a fresh mind in the morning, or get a Red Bull and put my foot on the gas. I ended up going the Red Bull route and finished writing the song in a couple more hours. I've had the opposite happen many times where I'm still burned out and now I can't sleep, so I was over the moon thrilled. I went from not knowing how I was going to finish the song to making plans to shoot the video the next day.

I put the finishing touches on the recording Tuesday morning and sent Jon his lines. The plan was to shoot the video after rehearsal. Eric stuck around to help and it was another very fun shoot. We spent a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to shoot it as the room is filled with musical equipment + my home studio. We ended up shooting every angle against the same wall.

We wrapped around 2 am. Once again, I'm so lucky to have a team that is able to commit to these ridiculous concepts and make them a reality. Very impressed with Jon's acting skills and hope there's a lot more where that came from.

I'm really proud of this one and happy with how it turned out. I hope you all enjoy it!

Okay time to sleep.

-Nick