Jerkatorium

Jerkatorium

Friday, May 19, 2017

Three New Jerkatorium Songs! And Jerkatorium Loses! Twice!

Jerkatorium tied for second place on the Ocean of Blood Song Fight.  It's fine that we didn't win that one, Flaming Tiger had a great song that deserved to win.  We had also won six out of the previous seven fights we'd entered, so it was good to have one in the loss column to keep us grounded.

Jerkatorium also continued to compete in Nur Ein XII with three new songs: Tired of Talking, Regime Change, and A Sense of the Absurd, all of which can be heard and/or downloaded at this link:

http://nurein.songlander.com/bands/625B65FA9A10E109641A9A471F026BE9

As I'd mentioned in previous posts, extra non-optional requirements are imposed on the Nur Ein title assignments:

The lyrics for Tired of Talking had to be limited to one sentence.  The rules stated that run-on sentences were fair game, and that the sentence could be repeated any number of times in the song.  Brian Raiter wrote our sentence for us, and I really liked how that song turned out.  Some of the judges didn't like our approach, but we still made it through to the next round.

Regime Change had the added requirement of two guest singers, plus the added constraint that none of those guest singers could be current or former Nur Ein participants.  Song Fight semi-regular Jeff DeSantis was one of our guest singers, and wow, he did a great job.  Our other guest singer was Sheri Hinshaw, who also did a great job, but the recording quality was sub-par because her lines were recorded on her phone.  We hope to revise the song with a cleaner take in the future.  Regardless, the judges enjoyed the song and I really enjoy listening to it.

The lyrics for A Sense of the Absurd had to be written around a mondegreen (a misheard lyric).  We struggled with this one a bit, working on and subsequently discarding three distinctly different approaches before settling on a direction.  We were still writing parts of the song within two hours of the submission deadline.  In my opinion A Sense of the Absurd was our weakest Nur Ein composition (my fault, not Chumpy's).  We were eliminated from the competition that round by the slightest margin imaginable:  We tied with another band for third-to-last place so the judges voted between us two tied bands, and we lost by one point.  That other band was 73 Keep It Beautiful, and I thought their song was one of the best from that round, so I'm only surprised we didn't lose to them by a wider margin... though I do think a couple of the bands who scored better than either of us had songs that were considerably worse.

So we were eliminated from Nur Ein after five songs.  The way I look at it, we generated five great songs in five weeks, and that's a good thing.  So now it's back to the Song Fights - I'll keep you posted on our upcoming songs.