Rebecca Pittenger's Podcast of Weird Songs

This song came to me in a dream...it's about pot smoking grandmas. I once saw a video of grandmas smoking pot and getting real stoned. That was after Washington state made weed legal. So here were these nice old ladies who finally go the opportunity to smoke cuz now it was legal. It was a really funny video. 

I got one of those scam calls about my car warranty expiring and thought it would be nice to make a song about it. Here it is.

This is the next song in the possession album; everyone goes to Timmy and Bobby's house, and the familiarity of it gives everyone a warm, cozy feeling. They plan on smoking pot. I made this song "explicit" in the little filtering thingy cuz it has pot in it. Oh yeah, while I was recording the beat-thingy, my computer made a Facebook notification sound near the very end. Those dastardly Facebook notifications.

I did a slightly different remix of this song from last night - the rap was sort of blending in with the rest of the instruments and not popping out in that sparkly manner that I usually try to go for in those rap-stylin's. I realized after a few listens, that there actually are a fair number of parts of this recording that approximate that drunk-church sound. With a wee bit o' Willie Nelson style harmonies thrown in, for good measure.

The chorus of this song came from a dream, so I figured I'd try maneuvering it into one of those songs that sounds like people in a church singing so exuberantly that they sound drunk. I still don't think I've achieved that specific drunk-church sound yet, but there're moments where this song comes close. Anyway, it's a song about how animals are so much better than humans at knowing when someone or something they're confronted with is bad. Animals are really smart about that. Humans, on the other hand, are really stupid when it comes to that.

I was all sitting there, thinking, it would be cool to record another song today, but I dunno what to write a song about. Then the leaf blowers started up. They're always here for about a half hour or so on Fridays, and it's usually when I'm just about to lay down a vocal track. As you can imagine, that jams up the works for me because I don't wanna have all the bleed-through of yucky leaf blower sounds on my vocal tracks. But, today was different. Today was the day I recorded a song about leaf blowers with an actual leaf blower in it. Yay, me.

This is the next song in the possession album: I was in the mood to do a wee bit o' hip hop. It's about how it would be good for Timmy, Bobby, Father O'Malley, and the Me-Character to stay close cuz the world is gonna soon get scarier than it already is. Geez, man, my stuff's been a little bit apocalyptic at times lately. It's probably cuz of the stuff happening in the world in real life.

This is the second song in my drunk church series, but I don't think I've, yet, achieved that drunk church sound I'm looking for. The people, singing in church, so exuberantly that they sound drunk, are singing to the earth. They're apologizing to her for how much we've trashed her, usin' the metaphor of a living room that's piling up with trash.

Here's another reprise of the We Dunno Just How To Live song for the Possession Album. They're almost home and feeling strange about returning to the familiar.

Yeah, let'see if I can make this explanation not too long winded. In this Year of my Writer's Block, I was tossing around ideas for concept albums, which might potentially get the creative juices flowing. One o' the things I've been aspiring to do for a while is to record songs that sound like a bunch of people in a church, singing church songs so exuberantly that they sound drunk. I think the closest I've come to that sound has been "Over an Hour Away From Home" and "Happy Birthday, Bro" (although I wasn't consciously trying to get the drunk-church sound on those songs - it just sorta happened).  Anyway, yesterday morning, I was thinking it might be fun to focus for a while on recording fake drunk-church hymns. But then I thought to myself, what would the hymns be about? I ain't been to church in many, many years. What're hymns usually about? Well, there was something deeply disturbing that happened to me the other day. I saw this picture on Facebook of a statue that had been burnt up in the Hiroshima bombing, and something about it freaked the fuck out of me. I realized after thinking about it for a while, that it felt to me like the soul had been burnt out of the statue. The statue now has no soul. That was freaky, because I tend to think of everything as having a soul. There've been times I've walked through places and felt a creepy emptiness about those places. I've wondered for a while if those're places that don't have souls. (I think of places as having souls). For a while I've hypothesized that these places don't have souls because some atrocity happened in said places, and either the soul of the place died or it flew away.That led me to my idea of what the fake, made-up hymns could be about. See, I've wondered for a while if music can bring a soul back to life or if music can call a lost soul  back to where it belongs. I realized yesterday, hey, that's what my fake hymns can be - they can be songs that cal the lost souls of places back home again, and those songs'll be sung by drunk church people.Phew, that was a long description.Anyway, this song ain't as churchy sounding as I'm planning the rest to sound like. I guess you can think of this one as a general introduction. Yay.