"My favorite creative writing professor once told me that a lie is sometimes more true than the truth."
- Shael Riley, TGCYesterday we sat down with Shael Riley and Beefy of The Grammar Club to talk writing and rapping for their new free nerdcore album, MC Horse Rides Again. Today, in the second half of our interview, we go track by track and discuss how each track got put together.
Track 1: Suck My Wallet
SR: I wrote this song before the Obama election. Long before. During the primaries. I was disgusted by the Republican primaries. I wanted to convey how out of touch I was with Republicans by writing a song in the persona of what I could only imagine they must be like.
CM: Yeah, I think Palin comes up at least once in your album.
SR: On "Unemployment." Yeah. But that's Beefy's writing. I tried to write a song using the reasoning a Republican must use to come to the terrible conclusions they do. I like how it came out. I think it sets the tone for the whole album. And I'm happy that it's a departure from Bremelanotide. I'm very proud of Bremelanotide, but I wouldn't want to write another album that sounded just like it and just had the same things to say.
Track 2: Breaking Up With Bret
SR: My best friend from college really did date this girl that drove him crazy for about a year. Or maybe he drove himself crazy over her, and she was just awful. And I wanted to just take him out of that relationship. But the best I could do was write this sort of nasty song about it.
CM: Was that whole Buddhist monk thing real?
SR: That is really true. Yeah. He was thinking about doing that. I feel like kind of a tool for writing it now, but I did it with the best of intentions.
Track 3: Super Girls and Ghosts
SR: Beefy was concerned that we didn't have any hooky, fun stuff on this album, so I wrote a hooky song. I just pulled the hook out of pretty much nothing. My brother was doing some comedy bit to me where he'd stammer "G-G-G-G" like he was going to say "GHOSTS!" like a scared cartoon character, but instead he'd say "GIRLS!" And it was kind of funny. I don't know. It's dumb as hell. I wrote a song about that. Beefy can rap about almost anything and make it good.
Track 4: Dance, You F-ckers
CM: How instrumental were you in putting this track together?
SR: I played a producer role. I organized it. C64 pitched us the demo, but it was all made from uncleared samples of other songs. But they're not characteristic riffs either. They're not samples you could copyright the composition of, merely the recording of.
SR: I played a producer role. I organized it. C64 pitched us the demo, but it was all made from uncleared samples of other songs. But they're not characteristic riffs either. They're not samples you could copyright the composition of, merely the recording of.
CM: It sounds really similar to stuff from "Sprinkles." Is that C64's influence?
SR: C64 sampled block chords and I had Ty just play the chords C64 had sampled, adding a bass line. I created a whole sample pack of me screaming for him to use, to replace the scream samples C64 used, but Ty only used one and it sounded good like that. Then I found a sample of my friend Zen Albatross, a chiptune artist, performing a live set during which he happened to scream "dance, you motherfuckers." I got clearance from him to use that sample.
Track 5: Normal
SR: Beefy's gonna hate me for saying this, lol. He called me up one night and left me a message where he sang this really crazy hook on my machine. It was a little bit like the hook in Normal but not too much. It went like "I want to be normal. I don't want to stand out. I want to be just like you and you and you and you and you and you." He said "and you" a lot. And after he sang that hook he said "Write a song that's like that," and hung up.
At this point it had mostly been me writing a hook and an instrumental and sending it to Beefy and going "Write something to this," so I was happy for this chance to reciprocate and I got right to it. And the next day he called me back like, "Dude, did I leave you some fucked up shit on your machine? I was high." (LOL) But I'd already written the instrumental and I was really into the song at that point. I'd gotten "lockstep robot" from a political blog. Someone had said how they admired Ron Paul for not being a lockstep robot, toeing the party line. I wrote a very modified version of the thing Beefy left on my machine that night.
Track 6: A Team By Myself
CM: So Beefy, everyone knows by now that you're a big dude. But, knowing that, this track seemed really personal. How much of this track was based on your own personal experiences? I understand that Ty was the one who wrote the original demo, so how much did you add to it?
BT: Originally I wrote about a one-man wrecking crew of a soldier, fed up with taking orders and decided to lay the whole world to waste. Shael heard it and was kind of like, “Dude, what is this? Just write about being big.”
SR: I did ask him to re-write A Team by Myself. Originally he'd written lyrics that made it sound like he was going to go shoot up a school. About his bazooka or something. It was kind of a scary, hot mess.
So I skyped him to talk about it. And he was like "I thought we were going for a kind of Trent Reznor thing." And I was like "Well, musically, but not lyrically." And he was like "Oh! Got it. Let me take another crack."
BT: I don’t usually write about being fat, not because I’m ashamed or shy about it, but I just don’t want it to be my gimmick. My good buddy Billy The Fridge does it and makes it his own and is able to write increasingly clever material on the subject, and I know I could never keep that up. So yeah, there are parts that are personal when I talk about how it’s killing me and how sometimes I feel like I don’t care at all about my fitness. But that’s just one side of me. The other side has started going to the gym. Fat Beefy hates Gym Beefy.
BT: Originally I wrote about a one-man wrecking crew of a soldier, fed up with taking orders and decided to lay the whole world to waste. Shael heard it and was kind of like, “Dude, what is this? Just write about being big.”
SR: I did ask him to re-write A Team by Myself. Originally he'd written lyrics that made it sound like he was going to go shoot up a school. About his bazooka or something. It was kind of a scary, hot mess.
So I skyped him to talk about it. And he was like "I thought we were going for a kind of Trent Reznor thing." And I was like "Well, musically, but not lyrically." And he was like "Oh! Got it. Let me take another crack."
BT: I don’t usually write about being fat, not because I’m ashamed or shy about it, but I just don’t want it to be my gimmick. My good buddy Billy The Fridge does it and makes it his own and is able to write increasingly clever material on the subject, and I know I could never keep that up. So yeah, there are parts that are personal when I talk about how it’s killing me and how sometimes I feel like I don’t care at all about my fitness. But that’s just one side of me. The other side has started going to the gym. Fat Beefy hates Gym Beefy.
CM: But Beefy isn't on the hook. Is there something behind that?
SR: That's Ty. He wrote that hook as a joke entry to a short-form music writing contest I hold just about every month. It's a team contest, but he didn't have a teammate. He's kind of a fat guy too. So he submitted that and we all thought it was lulzy.
Track 7: No Homo
CM: Ok, I have to ask - did this actually happen? 'Cause that would be awesome.
BT: It didn’t happen to me. It’s more about what I might do in that situation. I also thought it was a cool way to change a story up. I’ve heard a lot of bullying influenced tracks about gays overcoming adversity, but never one from the point of view of a “bro” who values honesty. Bieber wouldn’t write a song like that. It was up to me!
BT: It didn’t happen to me. It’s more about what I might do in that situation. I also thought it was a cool way to change a story up. I’ve heard a lot of bullying influenced tracks about gays overcoming adversity, but never one from the point of view of a “bro” who values honesty. Bieber wouldn’t write a song like that. It was up to me!
SR: I'd originally written No Homo as a Double Ice Backfire song, but I didn't like how it came out. It was originally a serious song about losing a friend, but it wasn't something I thought was really well-crafted or valuable.
When I wrote it as a DIB song, it wasn't about a friend coming out of the closet as gay. It was about just losing a platonic friend. It had different lyrics.
But I did say "no homo" in it. That's such a dumb expression. It implies you can't express any kind of affection for your male friends without that disclaimer.
CM: But it's the title of the song. Oddly enough, that particular phrase (no homo) got a lot of press recently. What gives?
SR: I sometimes write as a narrator I'm not sympathetic to. I'm using it in a piece of fiction. I am not the speaker in all of my songs. I am the author, but not always the speaker, even when I'm also the vocalist. I'm conveying an idea in my lyrics. I'm not writing my biography or personal statement.
My favorite creative writing professor once told me that a lie is sometimes more true than the truth. And I thought about it for years before it clicked. She is an awesome woman.
Track 8: Unemployment
CM: One of your lines was that your last album (presumably Sprinkles) was "a little Obama funded." How did your experience being unemployed affect you as an artist?
BT: As a nerd rapper my status isn’t so much measured financially as much as in how much free time I have, so in that regard I was king of nerd mountain! In reality though it was extremely depressing. I didn’t put it into song form because it’s not really something worth bragging about. But with Shael also living off the gov’t for some time he thought it would be best to channel it all into a track. Thankfully I just started a new gig, so the next album will not rely on “The Man.”
SR: I actually wrote the hook while I was at this awful desk job that was driving me crazy. White collar labor. I kept telling myself "the worst they could do is fire me." to steel myself from panic attacks. I hated that job with a passion. I would hum that hook at my desk, but I never recoded it while I was there. I recorded it months later, after I was laid off.
CM: Now, there are going to be critics who will say that a song celebrating unemployment is probably not the best use of taxpayer money. How do you guys respond to that?
SR: Fuck those guys. They're assholes. If they can't relate, then the song isn't for them.
CM: Well, tea partiers are partying harder than ever. Is this sort of a reaction to that?
BT: As a nerd rapper my status isn’t so much measured financially as much as in how much free time I have, so in that regard I was king of nerd mountain! In reality though it was extremely depressing. I didn’t put it into song form because it’s not really something worth bragging about. But with Shael also living off the gov’t for some time he thought it would be best to channel it all into a track. Thankfully I just started a new gig, so the next album will not rely on “The Man.”
SR: I actually wrote the hook while I was at this awful desk job that was driving me crazy. White collar labor. I kept telling myself "the worst they could do is fire me." to steel myself from panic attacks. I hated that job with a passion. I would hum that hook at my desk, but I never recoded it while I was there. I recorded it months later, after I was laid off.
CM: Now, there are going to be critics who will say that a song celebrating unemployment is probably not the best use of taxpayer money. How do you guys respond to that?
SR: Fuck those guys. They're assholes. If they can't relate, then the song isn't for them.
CM: Well, tea partiers are partying harder than ever. Is this sort of a reaction to that?
SR: If they say it's socially irresponsible or something, well, I don't think they have a reasonable case. It's not a backlash, though. It's just a song about my personal experiences and thoughts.
CM: Do you think we need a backlash?
SR: (LOL) I don't know. I don't want to repeat this album either. I don't have a deliberate plan to make TGC a really political band, but if it happens it happens.
Track 9: Stop Plate Tectonics
SR: Believe it or not, I wrote this song in early 2007, just after Bremelanotide. It's the oldest song on the album. I'd been reading predictions about how the housing crash was coming, and, sure enough, it did. I wish I could have gotten the song out before. I told my mom to invest in Yahoo in 1997 too. (LOL)
Track 10: Crashing Cars, Awarding Stars
CM: Is that last song......about Mario Kart?
SR: No. It was a given title from Song Fight, the only one on the album. It's really not about anything, save for a literal interpretation of the title many times. OK. That one line is a Mario Kart reference, but just that one.
MC Horse Rides Again, the newest album from nerdcore band The Grammar Club, is available for free in mp3 form on www.thegrammarclub.com. If you missed the first half of our interview with Beefy and Shael, you can catch it here.
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