October Project #1: Hellmo!

Happy Saturday everyone.

I mentioned last week that I was setting the lofty goal of releasing a song a week in October. I have another song fully written and another half written, but both are fairly ambitious and I wanted to start with something a little more straight forward (lol in hindsight).

SUNDAY

I sat at the organ and started playing around with different chord progressions. Here's a voice memo of Hellmo's infancy. I was playing with around with a different chorus progression that I eventually scrapped.

I went downstairs to the new studio (eek!) and began working on the production. We saw Big Boi perform the night before and there was a moment during "The Whole World" that I realized Outkast has probably been a subconscious influence on a lot of my work. Specifically, the combination of high pitch vocals with super low vocals when they sing "Ba ba, ba-ba ba da." I saw Outkast in 2014 and its one of my top 10 favorite shows ever. 

During that moment in The Whole World I knew I wanted to incorporate that same vibe into my next song. So I laid down a basic track and recorded the LA LA LA LA's. I still had no idea what the song was about. I crafted the instrumental and spent the day trying to figure it out. Similar to how I used the creepy basement at the old house as a character in my songs, I've been trying to identify what I can use as tools around this new location. "Voices coming from my shed" came pretty early, but I couldn't land on satisfying concept. We had some friends over that afternoon and I played them the instrumental. They have a boy who is a few months older than Sage and the dad joked that I should have him record Big Bird's line "To think he wrote this alone!" from Elmo's song because of the LA LA LA LA's. I thought it was funny, but I have a tendency to not see things right in front of my face for a while. They left and I sat at the computer letting the instrumental loop for an hour. Nothing! I could not figure out what I wanted the song to be about.

MONDAY 

Almost immediately upon waking up, I had the lightbulb moment that a demonic Elmo in the shed would actually work perfectly. At that moment, the lyrics started pouring out. Simultaneous to this a-ha moment I had the realization that I was reusing the exact same chords as 'Persecuted Man' and wondered if I needed to rethink things. I sought council and was advised to proceed.

I reached out to Eric to see if he would be interested in playing a demonic Elmo. Eric has this innate quality where he effortlessly brings other-worldly characters to life. I remember passing around the Gimmix heads at a rehearsal and every one of them looked exponentially better on Eric's head. My initial thought was we would paint Eric's head red, use the Sideshow eyeball glasses and I would figure out the orange nose. I went to Spirit Halloween and bought an Elmo onesie (sucked, didn't think we would use it) and a red leotard. 

My brother Jacob has been entering his horror shorts into film festivals and I knew he would be perfect for this. He told me he was available Wednesday night and the plan was locked. I got to work recording the vocals Monday evening, but I was stuck on the second verse. 

TUESDAY

I couldn't land on a second verse that I was happy with. I had this whole mythology planned that Elmo was building an army. He kidnaps humans, transforms them into puppets and takes them back to Sesame Street where they are damned for eternity. Then I got lost in the weeds of "Why is he building an army? Will he eventually wage a war on mankind?" I realized I was starting to lose the forest for the trees and reeled it in a bit. All of that could be baked into the subtext without me explicitly spelling it out. I spent most of the day writing, recording and polishing the mix. Once I had a full draft, I shot Brielle Garcia a message seeing if she could have a puppet version of me enslaved on Sesame Street by Thursday evening of Friday morning. You'll notice there is a trend here of remarkable people willing to fully commit to making my absurd ideas a reality on a moments notice. How lucky am I?

WEDNESDAY

I spent most of the day prepping for the video. Top objectives were 1. I wanted Elmo's mouth to be totally black 2. I needed to figure out how to do Elmo's nose.

I went to every Halloween shop looking for black mouth colorant, something that apparently only exists online. A lady at a local shop called "Beauty and the Beast" told me that mixing green and red food coloring does the trick. So I grabbed some fangs and headed to find food coloring. I tested it out myself, and while it tasted like poison, it did the trick.

I went home to make Elmo's nose but couldn't figure out a way to make it stay on my face. So I went to Walmart to find some swimming nose plugs. Eureka! It worked.

Eric showed up a couple hours later and we started testing everything out. He put on the Elmo onesie backwards and suggested attaching the glasses and nose to the costume itself. We started discussing whether it would work to cut open a hole for his mouth. We couldn't believe how good it looked. I will say the finished product looks 1000 X more terrifying than I could have imagined.

We had a ton of fun shooting everything and Jacob did a phenomenal job. We started around 7 pm and wrapped just after 2 am. The behind the scenes video I shared above does a pretty decent job showing how fun and monotonous these shoots can be almost simultaneously.

THURSDAY

We ended up shooting 90+ mins of footage, so I was convinced it would take a few days to edit. Surprisingly, I started around 11 am and had a locked cut around 7 pm. Eric was there for most of the edit and we had so much fun combing through all of our fight scenes. The opening minute was especially tricky to edit. We had an abundance of great footage for the second half that I didn't want to tease or spoil. So it took a lot of restraint to linger on the very long section of me stumbling about in the dark.

Unfortunately Brielle's ending wasn't ready Thursday evening and I didn't want to post to Twitter on Friday and have it lost in the weekend shuffle. I've had more success posting later evenings on Twitter and I really liked the idea of people watching before bed rather than on a coffee break at work or something.

Thanks for taking the time to read this essay. I'm really proud of this one! I'm sure there's more to say but I've officially spent too much time thinking about it.

Time to do it all over again for next week!

Bless you,
Nick