Beatnik Turtle's Encore Song of the Day

Ted Blegen showed up at the studio one session with a shiny new mandolin and only three chords. Of course, we had to write a song about it.

There was no keyboard available when this song was recorded, so all of the synth parts on this song were painstakingly hand-crafted and entered in by hand. The consensus was: playing keyboard parts using a keyboard is easier and more efficient.

Our friend was horrified when he found out that we took his joke voice mail from years ago and turned it into a song.

At Jason's workplace, there was an office that no one ever went into. His first thought was, "I wonder what the hell goes on in there." His next thought was, "Hey - that's a song!" To this day no one, but no one, knows what goes on in that office.

To his shame, about a month before this song was written in early 2006, Randy had no idea what the term Going Commando meant. The only way for him to repay his karmic debt was to write a song about it. Tom's inspired fingerpicking weaved it into a delicate threnody about freedom from wearing underwear.

This is an instrumental written quite some time ago, created by Jason.

This song was written for a sketch comedy show at Second City called "Sci-Fry" directed by Matt Scholtka. It was performed during a sketch called "Dr. Insidious Torture." In the sketch, Dr. Insidious Torture had captured our hero, the aptly-named, Captain Hero. Given the premise, we wrote an over-the-top theme for him drawing on our memories of sugar cereals and early Saturday mornings in front of the TV.

This song was specifically written as a tribute to BoardGameGeek's board gaming podcast, "GeekSpeak," when it was decided that the show was ending. The show aired for a year and a half and was hosted by Scott Alden (Aldie) and Derk Solko (Derk) of www.boardgamegeek.com. It was not only the first gaming podcast, it was also among the first podcasts ever, and had thousands of avid listeners. Beatnik Turtle's involvement with the show came after the first few episodes when the band, which was a fan of the show, wrote in and offered to write and record a theme song for it.

Ironically, "Face Down In The Snow" was written on an extremely snowy weekend. Wait, that would be unironically, wouldn't it? Oh well, the point is it was quite a blizzard, with traffic accidents, and power outages all over the area.

We had luckily made it up to the cabin in Wisconsin for a big recording weekend before it hit. But shortly after arriving and settling in, we suddenly realized that Steve Owens, our keyboard player and John Owens' brother, was nowhere to be found. He was there...then he wasn't. Weird.

John's reaction was: "Jeez, I hope he's not face down in the snow somewhere." We all looked at each other, and said, "That's a song!"

Rather than head out in the blizzard to find him, we headed back downstairs to write the song. It's a song that couldn't have been written with Steve. Luckily, we didn't have to play it at any memorial for him or anything: Steve made it safely back home through the blizzard in one piece.

Years ago, Jason got trapped in his room many, many years ago during some big party his mom threw. Luckily, he was trapped with his Casiotone and a four-track. Having nothing better to do, he wrote this song.

The old lady crowd noises at the beginning and end of the song are all real and were recording at the time thanks to Jason's spy training and his cunning ability to slip the microphone out the door unnoticed. Contrary to public opinion, no old ladies were harmed in the making of this song.