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calzona-ga · 3 years

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Since 2005, Shondaland has produced groundbreaking television. And over the course of 17 seasons, Grey’s Anatomy has made more than its fair share of bold choices. From the killing off of Patrick Dempsey’s beloved McDreamy to the still-controversial ghost-sex story line, the ABC series has seen, and done, it all. But perhaps no episode was riskier than turning the popular medical drama into a musical for “Song Beneath the Song,” the infamous season-7 hour in which a pregnant Callie (Sara Ramirez) gets badly injured in a car accident and, while her fellow doctors work to save her life, sees her hallucinatory self burst into song — with the rest of the characters quickly following suit.

Coming from the mind of series creator Shonda Rhimes, a vocal fan of both Broadway shows and TV musicals like Buffy’s “Once More, With Feeling,” the Grey’s musical episode was a monumental moment for the show and for television. Many viewers praised its audacity and swooned over the vocal chops of stars like Ramirez and Chandra Wilson.

“Song Beneath the Song” made for one of the most memorable hours of television, earning strong ratings and leading the soundtrack, particularly Ramirez’s show-stopping rendition of Brandi Carlile’s “The Story,” to Billboard success. A decade later, its impact is still growing, thanks in part to the countless teenage Grey’s fans who’ve only recently discovered the series via Netflix. Like the show itself, the musical has become an indelible part of TV history — and so, 10 years after its premiere in March 2011, we spoke to the episode’s cast and crew to get the story of how it came to be.

Featuring thoughts from Rhimes; writers, producers, and co-showrunners Tony Phelan and Joan Rater; and actors Wilson, Kevin McKidd, Jessica Capshaw, Kim Raver, and Eric Dane, this is the oral history of “Song Beneath the Song.”

Finding the Inspiration

Inspired by a 2008 benefit concert in which several stars of Grey’s and its spinoff show Private Practice performed songs to support out-of-work Hollywood workers during the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, Rhimes decided to turn her long-held desire to make a Grey’s musical episode into a reality.

Rhimes (series creator and writer): I remember thinking to myself at a certain point, I have this sort of murderers’ row of Broadway people. Like, Chandra had been on Broadway and singing; obviously, Sara Ramirez had won a Tony on Broadway [for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, in 2005], which is how I first met her; and then I knew that Kevin could sing. There were so many people in the show with beautiful voices. ... It felt like it was leaning in that direction in a good way.

Rater (writer, producer, and co-showrunner): The first iteration for, like, two days when we first started batting around the idea was that we would write original music. It was all gonna be original music. And then we quickly realized that a) who’s gonna write that music?, and b) no, it doesn’t feel like the right thing. And then Shonda, I think a day or two later, came in with the idea that we would use these iconic songs.

Wilson (Dr. Miranda Bailey): But the studio wasn’t quite on board with this whole idea.

Convincing a Skeptical Network

After coming up with the episode’s plot and deciding that the characters would sing classic songs from the Grey’s soundtrack, like Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” and the Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” Rhimes pitched the idea to the network — but, in a surprising first, she was told that they were going to pass.

Rhimes: By that point, I wasn’t getting notes on anything; nobody was saying no to me about anything. So it was really bizarre to me that there was all this resistance to doing a musical episode. And I remember somebody at the network saying, “Can’t you just do one of your love-triangle thingies again?” And I thought, my head’s gonna explode, because the show is not a bunch of “love-triangle thingies.” You guys have missed the point entirely. I felt like, no, every year of the show is a completely different show, and this year the show has a musical episode. And that’s the story.

McKidd (Dr. Owen Hunt): Tony, Joan, and Shonda basically said to us, “We are trying to convince Disney to give us actual money to do this musical episode, and we feel like we want to do a show-and-tell to show them what this musical episode could be. Are you guys willing to give your time to help us create this show-and-tell?” And we were like, “Yeah, of course.”

Wilson: So we gave them a concert. Sara, Kevin McKidd, and I, along with musicians, got together, and we performed this script that Shonda and Tony Phelan put together. Shonda did the narrating. And we went through what the entire episode would be, based on those iconic songs.

McKidd: I remember Sandra Oh came to the concert for the execs just to be moral support for us. And she became like our groupie — she would stand and cheer and whoop and holler in between all the songs.

Phelan (writer, producer, director, and co-showrunner): Once [the executives] saw it, and saw it could work, then they gave us the okay to do it.

Rhimes: I still feel like they thought we were crazy. But you couldn’t deny the talent in the room.

Getting the Cast on Board

Once the episode was greenlit, the team began the task of persuading a cast full of non-singers to simultaneously sing, act, and — in some cases — dance on screen.

Wilson: The offer was put out on the table from the beginning from Shonda — anybody that’s not interested in singing, you’re not required; you don’t have to do it.

Rater: I think Sandra from the beginning was like, nope.

Rhimes: She looked at me — it was her very deadpan face — and she was like, “I’m not singing.” And I was like, okay! If that’s not your thing, that is not your thing — that’s completely okay. And it didn’t feel like she was afraid to sing or push past this barrier. It felt like Cristina Yang doesn’t sing. And that made sense to me.

Rater: Ellen [Pompeo] has a great voice. She could’ve done more. ... Ellen was very gracious about, like, “I’ll doo-wop in the back; don’t worry about me. Let’s hear Chandra, let’s hear Sara, this is theirs.”

Capshaw (Dr. Arizona Robbins): In addition to Sara having this powerhouse voice, she was always very generous about others and never made anyone feel smaller because of her giant power. But singing with her was like, “Aw, man [laughs], how about you get this one? You got this leg of the race.”

Wilson: Probably the most frightened person was Kim Raver, bless her heart.

Raver (Dr. Teddy Altman): It was super-exciting and terrifying at the same time. We all love singing, but unless you’re Sara Ramirez or Chandra Wilson.

Dane (Dr. Mark Sloan): I don’t fancy myself a singer, so I said, “Shonda, in this particular episode, I want the least amount of lines.”

Rhimes: Eric Dane surprised me, because his voice had this lovely quality to it that was really nice.

Dane: I set her up for a catastrophe, so she had very low expectations.

Starting Rehearsals

For months leading up to the episode, the cast embarked on a grueling series of rehearsals and voice lessons, adding hours onto their already long daily schedules.

Capshaw: I had just had a baby, and I was really taking my life one day at a time. I knew it was going to be a big episode, but, timeliness-wise, it was a tough time. I think I was still breast-feeding.

Phelan: Usually in the writers’ room, you’ve got maybe six-to-eight weeks from the time you come up with an idea to the time that it’s shot. This we needed almost the entire season to plan for.

Raver: It was like riding a bike but then adding, like, six more wheels to it, and you had to kind of figure it out.

Capshaw: We were all bringing our A games. In normal days, it feels like there’s a familiarity, you can feel a little more casual, a little more off-the-cuff, but there was nothing off-the-cuff about this. It was all very high stakes because it was life or death, literally.

There were some silver linings, though.

Dane: We had these little earbuds in our ears, I guess like how you film musicals, so you can sync what you’re mouthing with the music in your ear. And so I went to the sound operator and said, “I can buy one of these earbuds, right? And I can create a content-receiver pack and connect it to an iPod and pipe music into this too theoretically, yes?” And he said, “Yeah, you could do that if you want to.” So I said, “So when I’m performing surgery in later episodes on this show, and I don’t have very many lines, theoretically I could be listening to music, and nobody would know?” And he said, “Yeah, theoretically, that would work.” So I had one made, and I shot many episodes in the surgical theater, sometimes with lines, listening to music, many times.

Filming the Episode

“Song Beneath the Song” revolved largely around the seriousness of Callie’s condition, but there were also some light moments, including a sexy, dance-filled take on “Running on Sunshine” featuring several of the show’s couples.

Capshaw: When Sara and I are in the car in the clouds — oh my god, I’ve never felt so goofy in my life [laughs].

Raver: Scott Foley [who played Teddy’s love interest Henry] and I had so much fun working together. He’s so funny, and so choreographing that dance singing number was really fun.

Wilson: Debbie Allen sent in Eartha Robinson, one of her choreographers from the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, who I knew from Fame, the television series. So this is who was coming in, teaching us how to twirl. And I was like, oh my god, I’m on Fame!

Early in the episode, McKidd’s Owen sing-shouts at his crew of doctors to “calm down” — a moment that, years later, became a widely shared meme for its over-the-top nature.

McKidd: In the scene, I think it was Kate Walsh — she’s brilliant; she’s a prankster — and Patrick and Eric Dane. And they were all arguing. And I’m sitting there and [the cameras] push in on me and I go, “Calm down.” And they couldn’t keep a straight face. Every time we did a take, they just would fall over laughing. And they were on camera giving me the eye line, and I had to sing this song seriously with those two actors just doubled over, like sidesplitting. It just tickled their funny bones so much. That was one of the hardest acting days of my life [laughs].

Capshaw: For sure, many, many, many shots were taken at Kevin McKidd for his “calm down” [laughs]. ... He really took on the rock-&-roll part of it.

McKidd: My daughter, who’s big on Twitter, she said that “calm down” thing’s like a serious meme thing now, which I guess is an honor. I don’t know.

The biggest moment of the hour came at the end, when Ramirez, a Tony winner for Spamalot, sang “The Story” as Callie fought for her life.

Phelan: When Sara came to Grey’s, she had this idea that she absolutely wanted to be known as an actress not a singer. And so for her first couple seasons on the show, she kind of left that side of her behind. Then, here was Shonda and I coming to her and saying, “No, we want to re-engage that part of you and put it on the show.” And so I think that she got nervous about that ... but to hear that amazing, magical voice come out of her ... that was the moment that was going to be able to sustain the music [of the whole episode].

Rhimes: When she sings “The Story,” I mean — I wrote the episode; I know what’s gonna happen. I’ve seen it a thousand times. It has nothing to do with me. But I always tear up a little bit because of her extraordinary voice and extraordinary performance.

Wilson: What a showcase it was for Sara Ramirez. I’m so glad that she got to share that part of herself with our audiences.

Reading Those Reviews

On March 31, 2011, the episode aired. While it garnered strong ratings, viewers’ reactions to “Song Beneath the Song” were mixed.

McKidd: I think we all went into it with our eyes open, and we knew there was gonna be mixed reviews. Because some people are gonna love it, and some people aren’t. But that shouldn’t stop people from taking a few risks in what we do, you know?

Rater: I remember being shocked that there were people who didn’t like it. I was like, come on!

Capshaw: It didn’t feel like [the reviews] were gonna affect anything either way. It wasn’t gonna be like, “Oh my gosh, that was too silly, and I’m never watching Grey’s again.” It had already found its place in people’s hearts.

Rhimes: I learned very quickly [on Grey’s] that if you’re gonna believe the good things people say about you, you have to believe the bad things people say. So there’s no point in paying attention to any of it. ... Nobody’s gonna like everything that you do.

Phelan: I know there are a lot of people who don’t like it, who felt like it bent the show too much, but it’s season 7 of a show, and if you’re not taking big swings when you’re on season 7 on a show, something’s wrong.

Creating a Legacy

Despite the critical reactions, the episode has developed something of a cult following over the years, thanks to live benefits and TikTok memes. A decade later, its creators all look back fondly on the hour and its impact.

Wilson: [The cast] watched it together, and I remember feeling like, wow, look at what we did!

Capshaw: When we showed up to do that benefit concert, I remember coming out onstage ... and being completely, completely overwhelmed with the people that responded to Arizona in that episode, and to the love story between Callie and Arizona.

Phelan: As a director, it was the biggest challenge of my career to do that, and it’s one of the things that I’m most proud of.

Raver: I’ll be in my car singing along, or at work if we’re in the hair-and-makeup trailer and we’re listening to [the soundtrack], it’s just an immediate flashback. It kind of feels like yesterday.

Wilson: The soundtrack is on my playlist on my phone [laughs]. So I will pop that thing out in a minute, because it’s just absolute happy memories.

Rater: If I’m cooking, that is what I put on. That’s what I tell Alexa to play for me.

Rhimes: I feel like that episode just always reminds me of having so much fun. That was what was really great. We had so much fun. And how much do you get to say that about just being at work?

Dane: As a cast, contrary to what some of the entertainment media might have speculated, we were all very close. We all spent a lot of time together, and a lot of that stuff felt really real to us. It was easy to access because of how we felt about each other off screen.

Raver: I just remember it being such an incredible experience, being able to work with all these incredibly talented actors and creators.

Rhimes: It’s right in my top 10 of episodes we’ve ever done.

Dane: I don’t particularly want to do it again, but I’m glad I did it.

#grey's anatomy #7x18 #jessica capshaw #eric dane #chandra wilson #shonda rhimes #kevin mckidd #kim raver #tony phelan #Joan Rater

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omgyouatetheprincess · 4 years

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Janus’ Playlist

AHH JANUS' PLAYLIST LETS GOO

Not that anyone asked for my opinions

Okay so I'd like to start by saying that Thomas, Joan and Talyn did an amazing job on this playlist because every song fits Janus so perfectly.

Here are some of my thoughts on the songs and some interpretations I came up with or found on the internet.

Trigger Warnings - abortion. Mocking of religion.

Black Hole Sun - okay at first I was like 'wow this is really smooth and nice and the vocals are so sweet.' Then I heard the lyrics. "In disguises no one knows,

Hides the face, lies the snake". It's such a Deceit song and I imagine him dancing to it (with or without a partner).

Black Hole Sun by Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox, Haley Reinhart

It Seemed That Better Way - holy heck, can I point out that this song is such a bop? Leonard Cohen has such a soothing voice and it reminds me of Patrick Page (aha Hadestown) and if Janus wasn't played by Thomas, I could imagine this as his voice. The song is about not knowing what the truth is and what to believe, and has religious meanings which could be countering Patton and his Catholic beliefs.

It Seemed The Better Way by Leonard Cohen

Anywhere - I feel like Patton would hate this because the first line is "It's a beautiful world if you've been lied to by parents and priests". Anywhere describes how the world isn't a beautiful as it may seem, and that people lie to make you see it.

Anywhere by The Scarring Party

Talking At The Same Time - it is immediately dark and that everything seems fake and a... Lie. A lot of Deceit's songs are about the truth or that everything is a lie and I have to give massive kudos to Thomas, Joan and Talyn because they did an excellent job portraying Janus through his music taste. The song describes how everyone talks at the same time, and what I interpret that as is that everyone says the same thing over and over. It's hard to explain so I'll let you make your own interpretations of it.

Talking At The Same Time by Tom Waits

all the good girls go to hell - I'm not going to lie (ha) but I don't like Billie Eyelash, but I'll see past the artist. My first thought when I saw the song without hearing it is that it's a good choice and Janus probably loves Billie Eilish. Spotify has meanings of songs so I'm going to go off there: "This song is in the perspective of the Devil / no matter how good you are, desperate measures will eventually break you / turn you into bad." I feel like Deceit would sing this around the house. This song is twisting Christian symbolism and the lyrics can be interpreted as Eilish praising people who go to hell as it's better than being morally good. (Also, just switch Peter with Patton)

all the bad girls go to hell by Billie Eilish

Denial - KDJIEKAKSNDENIAL? In Putting Others First, Janus is referred to as Denial and now this song? Everyone start clapping for Thomas and his team. Anyway, the song discusses themes of conflict within a relationship, and the denial and insecurity of being in a relationship near it’s end (source: Genius). Also, Roceit vibes?

Denial by The Vaccines

Trust In Me - first of all, heck yeah! I predicted this song to be on his playlist because it's a slimy snake song from Disney? Hello this is Thomas? I think it's a great song and Johansson's voice is angelic. Kaa is manipulating and hypnotizing Mowgli, and if Deceit could do the same you can bet your bottom dollar he would sing this. We love our not-evil snake boi.

Trust In Me by Scarlett Johansson

Razzle Dazzle - Janus singing this with Roman? Yes please? Okay so I get that this is a villian song, and I love that, but imagine Deceit in a shiny sequenced dress? I also haven't seen Chicago yet so I'm going off what I've heard - this song describes how it is too easy to put on a show and make the audience happy. Basically, acting is just professional lying. The line "Though you are stiffer than a girder they'll let you get away with murder" is so clever (no spoilers but he had it coming)

Razzle Dazzle by Richard Gere

[SLIGHT HADESTOWN SPOILERS]

When The Chips Are Down - I hecking love Hadestown so you can bet I squealed when I saw this song. This song is sung by the fates, who are portrayed at untrustworthy. The title of this song is derived from the idiom “when the chips are down”, meaning “when a very serious and difficult situation arises”. Eurydice is in potentially one of the most serious and difficult situations she could be in: her life is at stake. After Hades invites Eurydice to come with him to Hadestown, the Fates appear and encourage her to consider his offer. They tell her that she should look after herself now that she is starving and the “chips are down”. (Source: Genius). In my own words, the fates are convincing (or manipulating if you will) a poor helpless girl to put herself first and save herself. It also mentions how if you be good to get into heaven,you get a knife in the back.

Go listen to Hadestown, it's an incredible soundtrack.

When The Chips Are Down by Anaïs Mitchell, The Haden Triplets

[TW! Abortion]

Mandy Goes to Med School - okay so this song is about abortion, so we'll have to go off context. Mandy (or Amanda Palmer) has to pay for Medical School by giving abortions in an alleyway with a coat hanger, so I interpret this as having to do shady stuff to get what you want. I think him and Remus would enjoy this song together. I'd also like to note that Logan had a song by Amanda Palmer in his playlist... That isn't relevant but I wanted to note that.

Mandy Goes to Med School by The Dresden Dolls

I Put A Spell On You - 50SOG vibes? I really like this song, it has a nice rhythm and the lyrics are so creepy. This gives me vibes of Deceit cornering/pining another side/love interest because if our baby boy wants to be happy, he should. This is similar to Trust In Me because it talks about enchanting someone to get what you want. "I don't care if you don't want me, I'm yours right now." Chills. Janus singing this song would complete my life.

Also the singer calls the love interest daddy but we ain't shaming

I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone

Evil Night Together - well the title has evil in it so... Perfect for our Evil Snake Boi. This song gives me huge Demus/Receit vibes because it's basically like "let's go on a date in the creepiest place."

What if we drank a drink in the torture chambers... Haha jk ...unless 🥺

Evil Night Together by Jill Tracy

Don't Tell Mama - another musical song? Roman would be impressed. This song is about an English singer, who's mother thinks she's in a convent (a nun), when really she's in a German s3x club. You can really tell why it would be so bad if her secret got out.

Don't Tell Mama by John Kander, Joel Grey, Jill Hawarth, Cabaret Ensemble, Harold Hastings

You're A Cad - definition of a cad: a man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards a woman... This song has a nice beat and gives me TikTok vibes, but it also gives me Moceit vibes (I say vibes too much) because the singer is saying "you're a villain, a cad, a rascal... But I'm like a fish on a hook for you and I still want you." Also, she has a sweet tooth?

You're A Cad by the bird and the bee

As Far As I Can See - all aboard the angst train, CHOO-CHOO "As far as I can see, nobody loves me. As far as I can tell, nobody loves you either" this song gives me such Roceit vibes because the meaning is pretty simple: if nobody loves Janus, then he'll take everyone down with him. I knew there would be that one song that tries to make me cry for our poor baby.

As Far As I Can See by Phantogram

Criminal - first of all, the cover is beautiful. Apple describes the song as “a description of feeling bad for getting something so easily by using your sexuality.” She also told in an interview: "One of my friends said to me, “Oh yeah, of course you aren’t writing.” So I was like, “The next time you see me, I’m gonna have a new song.” I wrote “Criminal” in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me." Which is the level of pettiness I see in Deceit and I am here for it. The context of the song is seduction and manipulation, so Janus using his sexuality to manipulate the other Sides is a cursed thought.

Criminal by Fiona Apple

Change - if any of them listened to Lana Del Rey, I sort of expected it to be Virgil. Change shows how Del Rey has matured, and I feel like it also portrays Janus' ability to adapt. "Change is a powerful thing... I'll be able to be honest..." Does this mean he's trying to change? Will we get more character development? LIGHT SIDE JANUS?

Change by Lana Del Rey

Devil In The Details - this song is about trusting the wrong person and taking advantage of something. "I am the first one I deceive if I can make myself believe the rest is easy.". More angst, yay.

Devil In The Details by Bright Eyes

Come Little Children - if you had a My Little Pony phase, you probably know this song. Come Little Children, also known as "Sarah's Theme" and "Garden of Magic," is a song sung by Sarah Sanderson in the film, Hocus Pocus to hypnotize children to lure them. Manipulation: a common theme.

Come Little Children by Erutan

Into The Unknown - I was really shocked to see this song until I realized, no, it wasn't the same iconic theme from Frozen 2. This short song is from Over The Garden Wall, a show Thomas watches but I have not. "If dreams can't come true, then why not pretend?" The show plays heavily on the battle between dreams and reality (source: Genius). The way I see this, Janus is convincing the Light Sides to do something, or specifically Roman to make his dreams come true through selfish means.

Into The Unknown by The Blasting Company

This playlist is one of the best because every song had me saying “Janus would so sing this". If you have any thoughts, feel free to comment!

As always, take it easy guys gals and non-binary pals peace out

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earlgreytea68 · 4 years

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A Review of the Fall Out Boy Biography Inevitably Colored by Shippiness Oops But Really Mainly By My Love for Pete Wentz

I don’t even know who the audience is for this monstrosity of a review, nor do I know the audience for this biography, though, so, like, it’s fitting lololol:

I am a new Fall Out Boy fan. I say that because, if anybody was in need of a Fall Out Boy biography, you would think it would be a new fan. AND YET. I’m not entirely sure who the market for this book is, because it isn’t really Fall Out Boy fans of any duration, because not only can everything in the book be easily located with the simplest of Google searches but also there’s so much he leaves out. And what he leaves out is just…so incredibly telling. It’s like, the facts he chooses to highlight are often pointless and random (although thanks for telling me that Pete Wentz’s jeans were so tight he had to perform without underwear, I’m going to think about that a lot now), whereas the facts he leaves out are the ones that lend both complexity and context. Like, this whole book could be Exhibit A in how malleable facts can be. Given the same set of facts, this man and I would tell two very different stories.

At least partly this is because he’s a music critic (I glean from the book) and I’m a creative writer. I believe he is a music critic because he takes care to dedicate a paragraph of musical analysis to every song on their earliest CDs (he loses interest in them over the hiatus, and more on that later). I appreciated this, because I know nothing about music, and I learned a lot about how talented Patrick Stump really is, like, not as a vocalist, because I knew that, or as a musician, because I also knew that, but as a smart, clever songwriter. I don’t know how to critique music, and I was happy this guy was full of praise for what Patrick does. He also pointed out musical hallmarks of theirs – like their tendency to drop the music suddenly for Patrick to sing an a cappella line – and that was the first time I’d ever really thought about them.

He was full of much less praise for Pete’s lyrics, though, and I think that’s because he’s a music person, not a word person. Not that he thought Pete’s lyrics were ever bad but he tended to stay very conventional about them: emo, confessional, dramatic, and ingeniously juxtaposed with Patrick’s clear-as-a-bell voice. He’s kind of obsessed with the contrast between Patrick’s voice and the lyrics he’s singing, whereas I’m much more obsessed with the contrast between Patrick himself in sweater-paws and glasses snarling, “I am your worst nightmare,” like, sweetheart, I doubt it. AND YET HE PULLS IT OFF. Like, that’s so interesting to me, how much Patrick can make himself embody Pete, that act of alchemy where he sings on his behalf, but this book talks less about that than I think it might, mostly because I don’t think this guy really wants to think too hard about how incredibly good Pete’s lyrics actually are. The thing about Pete’s lyrics – he does this, and it’s so clever, it’s killer clever – is you can read them so easily on one very obvious and expected layer, and then there’s always one or two additional meanings tucked underneath them, and you might never stop to think about them, especially if you’ve already written him off, but his lyrics reward careful study and a lot of thought, he specializes in triple entendres, a turn of phrase that spins out into so many meanings, that’s so hard to do and he makes it look so easy that it’s such a simple mistake to dismiss it, to not even see how dense his poetry is. The conventional story on Pete Wentz is he’s good at marketing – marketing the band, marketing himself – and so he spun in circles to keep the spotlight on him and away from Patrick, and that’s definitely one take, and another take would be to point out that the same whirligig sex-symbol tabloid-fodder act also had the side effect of undercutting any tendency to take Pete seriously from a literary point of view, like, so much easier to just say that, in keeping with his goth guyliner, he wept into his inkwell and scrawled messily over parchment. So anyway: criticism #1 of this book is that they should have complemented the music-critic-ness with an English major.

Criticism #2 is that I feel like people always get wrong what appeals to girls, to speak in the massive generalizations of this topic. Like, someone somewhere was like, “Hey, girls like this Fall Out Boy band, it must be because Pete Wentz is hot.” And they’re not wrong about that, exactly, but they always seem to miss how many entangled layers often come with attraction. Like, yeah, sometimes it’s just he’s got nice abs but often there’s a million other things happening there, and one thing I cannot forgive this guy for is not just his failure to engage with Pete’s lyrics on any real level, but how little he also truly examines Pete Wentz’s genuine marketing genius. He’s a music guy: His interest is clearly in Patrick, and also in Joe and Andy, because they’re musicians, and he can wax poetic about them. Pete gets his standard paragraphs: Oh, he chose the right management, the right record label, the right deal. He can pick out a good band, like Panic! or Gym Class Heroes. All of that is true, but none of it really grasps exactly how smart Pete really is. Like, the book hardly mentions at all how much Pete realized immediately the value of internet fandom. When I first fell for Pete Wentz – that first weekend I spent Googling him – what really was the death knell for me was stumbling upon the old FOB Q&As he used to run in the earliest days. And it wasn’t actually his constant leaning into the Peterick shipping with such dead-on unerring understanding of fandom that did it for me (although that was pretty charming, ngl). It was how often teenagers messaged Pete Wentz with their problems, and how patiently he took the time to respond. My boyfriend broke up with me. My grandma just died. I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Again and again and again, Pete Wentz took these messages and wrote out detailed, laborious responses. And I know he was a guy angling hard to be famous but not all guys angling hard to be famous realized how important something like this is, this very personal connection, like, above and beyond the bantering and the smirks, and even if you’re doing it entirely for ulterior motives, that’s a ton of emotional labor he was performing. I finished reading those Q&As and thought, God, Pete Wentz must have been exhausted.

And I’m not sure that’s something the bio ever really wrestled with, because it never really talked about that aspect of him. I don’t actually think the bio read anything Pete Wentz has ever posted online, like, not even those basic Q&As that are the easiest thing in the universe to Google, never mind the secret blogs he still has scattered all over the internet with nuggets of lyricism buried in there for Patrick to mine. It’s just so easy to buy into the Peter-Pan, devil-may-care Pete Wentz picture, and for all I know that’s the truest of the pictures, but it’s also undeniable fact that the other side to that was either really cunning and savvy or just a nice guy, and either way it’s another layer to Pete Wentz that gets short shrift in the bio. Which isn’t surprising because although the author clearly appreciates Fall Out Boy the band, the author clearly isn’t fannish at all, whereas it’s pretty abundantly clear Pete Wentz is fannish. He’s unapologetically fannish. He speaks fan language with a fluency that is hard to fake. And he’s astonishingly well-versed in tropes. He’s instinctively good at creating a good story, not just in his lyrics (although he, like Taylor Swift, is adept at tropey lyrics, so it’s no surprise they have a mutual admiration society), but in his life. In addition to the Q&As, that first weekend was full of me being like, …How is this the tropiest thing I’ve ever read??? It’s unsurprising that the bio doesn’t point out all the tropes in the Pete Wentz / Patrick Stump / Fall Out Boy story, because the author isn’t versed in tropes, but Pete Wentz definitely is. He knows how to use words, well. And you wouldn’t necessarily know it to listen to him – he babbles and uses tons of filler phrases and never, ever ask him what his lyrics are about, it’s like trying to have a conversation in Wonderland – but that’s all part of the aw-shucks-sometimes-I-scribble-some-stuff-down-Patrick’s-the-real-genius brand.

Now I am not qualified to write a Fall Out Boy biography and also I don’t know these people and also everything I do know comes from Google but that said, I feel like I do know for a fact some primary source materials that the writer just chose to leave out that really does display how malleable stories can be depending on what you highlight or not. Like, if he didn’t want to draw psychological conclusions based on the facts that’s fair enough. But he also pared back the narrative so drastically that it left off the true meat of it, like, if you read this book you would not necessarily think there was much interesting about these people, whereas if you really dig into everything they’ve got out there, well, you could start to think they’re super-interesting people. But I am a creative writer and this biographer was a music critic. He settles happily into the song analysis but I’m busy connecting dots into a narrative, and life is complicated, it is not a simple narrative, but that impulse underlies most biography, the idea that we can assemble the facts into something that has something to say about a human life. But that act really exists in how you assemble the facts.

~~~~~~~~TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE DISCUSSION~~~~~~~~~~~

A really good example of this is the way the biography deals with the Best Buy incident. Here are the bare facts: Pete Wentz, in a Best Buy parking lot listening to Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” took too many Ativan. In a phone call, his manager noticed he was slurring, called his parents, they rushed him to the hospital, he lived. These are the facts that the book gives you, and these are true facts.

If you want to expand slightly upon these bare facts, Pete has given many, many interviews about this incident because he is very open about mental health issues and his bipolar disorder and depressive episodes and anxiety. Pete has said that he’s not sure he was trying to kill himself so much as just make his head quiet for a little while. Pete has said he felt like he was too busy being Pete Wentz for everyone else and he just wanted to rest. These are also facts, although ones I don’t think the biographer truly believes. He does dutifully quote them but he also clearly has his own belief about how much Pete’s telling the truth. Because this is inevitable in any telling of the facts.

If you want to expand slightly upon these facts, you could point out that Pete’s lyrics reflect how noisy his head is (“when this city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent”), which might color how you understand him when he says he just wanted some peace and quiet. You might also point out that, as the bio has already said, Pete was the driving force behind the band’s strategy and it was about to culminate. You might remind the reader that Pete walked away from other possibly very successful careers to do this band (there is much made in the book of the theoretical ease with which Pete could have achieved a soccer career, which made me raise my eyebrows a bit but, you know, Patrick does say Pete’s really, really good at soccer). You might recall that Pete has these kids relying on him whose parents he literally had to persuade to trust him. You might say that so far everything had gone exactly as he planned and he just needed to stick the landing. You might mention the fact that they kept rewriting songs and rewriting songs and rewriting songs; that Pete was in such utter meltdown mode that he was sliding lyrics under Patrick’s door and then retreating, so that the rest of the band never even saw him; that they had scrapped half the album and were furiously writing new music right up until the deadline – all of which are facts not even mentioned. You might say all of those things, because they are indeed all true facts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is appropriate at this point to note that many of these things were simply not germane to the story this biographer was telling, which was a music-critic-focused story. But these things are all incredibly germane to the story *I* would tell, about these four people who found each other, lost each other, and found each other again, and the two people at the center whose creative alchemy was by turns either too dazzling or too explosive and in both incarnations needed to find a way to balance to keep the band afloat. This is the story I would tell, but, to be totally honest, Pete and Patrick’s creative partnership doesn’t really seem to interest the writer of this book. He mentions it vaguely, in passing, once or twice, fairly standard surface proclamations about Pete handling lyrics and Patrick handling music, and Pete drawing the spotlight away from Patrick who didn’t want it. Or he’ll say that the true secret to the band’s success is Patrick’s voice and Pete’s lyrics, like Patrick could be any pretty-enough voice, which I think just isn’t true, there’s so much more to the way they clicked together. I read this great New Yorker article once about how, through history, genius exists in pairs, that often two people need to find each other to push each other to be better than they would ever be apart.

It’s fine to not want to get into that too intensely, it’s just that that means that half the story of Folie goes away, if you’re not focused on how the band was creating. Like, there’s so much about the lead-up to Folie to talk about: Patrick’s control over the music to the exclusion of everyone else, Pete’s worsening prescription pill thing, and the way that their creative partnership seemed to disintegrate while simultaneously leaving no room for Joe or Andy in the band. The book mentions really none of this – nothing about the fact that at one point they had descended into physical altercations over chord progressions; nothing about the story the producer tells that Patrick would get so frustrated after phone calls with Pete that he’d throw things around the studio; nothing about the story that Patrick once told Pete, “I don’t care, I’m going to write a song and call it ‘I Don’t Care,’” such a telling little tale when later Patrick comes to hate the song “I Don’t Care” – so the hiatus feels like it descends out of nowhere, with a paragraph about the fans not liking the album. Which, again, is a true fact, but without the other true facts of the way the entire creative process was crumbling around them, around all of them, it sounds less compelling. The bio does get into Joe wanting to flex his creative muscles more but doesn’t connect it back to the Folie era of being shut-out. The hiatus becomes entirely about Patrick not liking being booed.

Even worse to me is the book devotes a lot of time to each of their music videos, which is awesome, because their videos are important and great, but it devotes exactly zero time to the video for “What a Catch, Donnie.” And I’m so bewildered by that, you can have a field day with the symbolism in that video, even if you want to just make a true factual statement about its plot: Patrick collects all of the detritus of Fall Out Boy and all of their friends come and party with him, while Pete goes down with a sinking ship all alone, to a medley of the words he’s leaving behind. Like. That is literally what happens in this video. And then the hiatus starts. To me this is one of the most ridiculously angsty things ever, that they would go out to their own triumphs echoing back at them and the literal death of captain!Pete Wentz. To the story I would tell, this is the most germane. It merits not a single mention in the bio (other than praising the song itself for being one of the strongest on the album, and talking about the Elvis Costello cameo).

Because he’s much more interested in them musically than as people or relationships, he seems to lose interest in them post-hiatus. He details each of their hiatus-era projects with his typical attention to the music criticism side. And then he spends, like, eight pages talking about the guy who wrote the article that triggered Patrick’s “We Liked You Better When You Were Fat” blog post. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s an entire chapter dedicated to the article and the guy who wrote it. Patrick’s response is described and quoted and even praised, but not in nearly as much as detail as the original article, and Pete’s reaction to Patrick’s blog post gets literally zero attention. Which is fascinating since, in some tellings of the story, that’s the entire reason the hiatus ended. Pete has said on multiple occasions that he read the blog post and was upset Patrick was so upset and called him up and asked him to try writing with him again. But if you’re not actually interested in that creative relationship as a relationship, then you don’t see a reason to explain the motivation behind trying again.

You also don’t really see a reason to tackle why they initially struggled to get back into it. Like, truly grappling with the Pete/Patrick relationship leads to more depth than the surface “Patrick doesn’t like the spotlight, so Pete takes it for him.” That’s too simplistic a formulation, as Pete himself has said. It also discounts Patrick’s obvious dedication to Pete, his complete willingness to step in and publicly defend him on many occasions, like, Patrick’s no shy, retiring wallflower when it comes to Pete, Patrick can let loose viciously on behalf of Pete. Their protectiveness is mutual, although the public narrative often glosses over that. (In one of those “why leave that out” details, the biographer notes that Hemingway was Pete and Ashlee’s ring bearer but not that Patrick was Pete’s best man, Idk.) At any rate, I point that out because the struggle they had to find their groove writing together after the hiatus mirrored their initial struggles, to find their way into trusting each other’s strengths, but the book is just kind of like, “The first session wasn’t successful but the next session was. They were out of practice.” They weren’t out of practice with songwriting, not really, especially not Patrick – they were out of practice with each other. And that wasn’t just a hiatus-era souvenir, that went back to Folie, but we didn’t get that part of Folie.

The biographer also, annoyingly in my view, loses all interest in them at this point. He devotes almost no time to the post-hiatus era, which is fascinating to me, since their ability to launch a comeback as successfully and relevantly as they did is striking, and to do it not by relying on nostalgia but by generating genuinely new hits with a genuinely new audience, and he’s not interested in that at all. Even worse than not being interested in this is the fact that he fails to close the Folie loop, like, he devotes lots of time to Patrick coming to hate Folie because of how much the fans hated it. Then he makes a little note, like, “Maybe someday Patrick will come to love Folie again,” or something, and the thing is, I know the book was written a few years ago now, but there was definitely stuff available about how much Folie had become a fan favorite in the hiatus years. Patrick gave an interview somewhere where he talked about the reunion show and how he read fan reviews of it and the fans were like, “They should have played more songs from Folie!” I always think at that point And then Patrick looked into the camera like he’s on The Office. But, at any rate, Patrick got to see Folie become beloved and that loop could have been closed better and he just leaves it dangling. (I’m almost like, Did he really write most of this book while they were on hiatus and then when they came back he was like, …Goddamn it?)

He doesn’t at all get into the shock of the immediate level of success of their comeback, like, that’s another thing that’s documented, that they were unsure anyone would care and they were so startled by the response that they had to actually add larger venues onto their tour because they’d thought no one would want to come to their shows. He could have talked about how people waited hours outside in the Chicago cold to get into the comeback show, how they started the show with “Thriller” and Patrick says the response was electric and it must have been amazing and he’s just not really interested in it, you can tell that he’s bored. He doesn’t talk about how Patrick hadn’t really thought about having to perform the new songs live because he didn’t think anyone would really care about the new album, so they had to really think about how they were going to make it work, and how he almost permanently damaged his voice having to sing “Alone Together” live and that’s what finally finally drove him to pursue actual voice lessons, like, he mentions none of this, he’s just like, “They wrote Save Rock & Roll, and then they wrote American Beauty / American Pyscho.” He’s just clearly, at that point, bored. Whereas in the story I would tell, that is the most satisfying part, the happy ending beyond their wildest dreams.

Okay, omg, this is SO LONG, but here are some other random thoughts:

· He never – not once – goes back to source Pete’s lyrics to their original blog entries, which can be very interesting. This is because he’s not interested in the lyrics really, but it’s very frustrating to me because, like, SOMEBODY TAKE THESE LYRICS SERIOUSLY, PLEASE, THEY’RE SO GOOD. It also means that he misses things like “Miss Missing You” and the way it echoes Pete’s poem with the line “I miss you missing me,” like, that’s just a fact ::shrug:: He also says “Hum Hallelujah” is about teenage romance, and that is the most straightforward, surface-level reading, like, “Oh, it says ‘teenage vow in a parking lot,’ that’s what it’s about.” This pains me only because “Hum Hallelujah” might be the most perfect lyrically constructed song Fall Out Boy has, every line is golden and stuffed with meaning and emotion, and he’s just like, “teenage romance,” so dismissively, and I wince, like, “I could write it better than you ever felt it” is a line that deserves more than that. Not to mention “I love you in the same way there’s a chapel in a hospital,” god, or “One day we’ll get nostalgic for disaster,” ugh, do not read this book for lyrical analysis. He also terms the best lyrical line on Cork Tree as “To the ‘love’ I left my conscience pressed / Between the pages of the Bible in the drawer” and, while there’s nothing wrong with that line, I don’t even think that’s the best line in XO (I mean, leaving off the follow-up of “What did it ever do for me? I say” undercuts those lines immediately, imo). (He does at least point out that “Keep quiet, nothing comes as easy as you / Can I lay in your bed all day?” is a devastatingly sexy couplet.)

· Can I just say, the entire debacle with Hey Chris gets precious little time in this book, which in a way is fine but in a way is like, just by Googling I got way more information on what went down and the weird, weird words that were being flung back and forth (at one point the term “heterolifemates” is used which makes zero sense at all in this context), but this book does spend a lot of time with Chris and Pete pre-Patrick (fascinating, right???) and there’s this weird part where Chris says he hated Pete before he met him and is like, “He should wear pants that fit,” which is just…such an interesting reason to hate Pete Wentz, like, Idk, Chris, coupled with your heterolifemates thing and weird thing about “whose name do you say every night???” which is also weirdly sexual phrasing and also being like “no one knows how to break a heart like he does,” like, everything about this entire situation has so much queer subtext but the book doesn’t touch any of that, ever, in any circumstance, with a ten-foot pole.

· EVERYONE, THE BORDERS WHERE JOE AND PATRICK MEET IS LOCATED IN EDEN PLAZA AND I AM SO UPSET I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WHEN I WROTE THE DEVIL FIC.

· I did not know that the producer wanted them to change the “We’re falling apart to halftime” line in Dance, Dance because he thought it was too incomprehensible and I’m just like, That’s the lyric where you thought you were going to lose people??

· From the bio, describing the Live in Phoenix performance: a strange moment where Wentz inexplicably gets changed onstage. A strange moment? Inexplicably? Okay, like, germane to my telling of the story is how much those dick pics affected Pete Wentz’s public persona, how much he knew exactly what he was there to sell and he sold it with gusto, and how much of a spiral that ultimately sent him on. Instead, this biographer finds it inexplicable that Pete Wentz would take his shirt off onstage, and his analysis of the music video for “This Ain’t a Scene” gives the dick pic storyline only an offhand reference, calling it “making light” of the scandal, instead of really digging into the obvious pain there, like, that’s not a joyful lark there. (Later, much later, years later, Brendon Urie will manage to actually make light of the dick pic saga, both in the Drunk History and also in the joke of the dick pic being the photo that comes up when Pete calls him, as seen in the promos for the tour they did together, and that feels much more genuine. But that bit in “Arms Race” is kind of heartbreaking.)

· Pete says of their failed attempt to get the Guinness record of the first band to perform on all seven continents that it was the worst feeling he’d ever felt in Fall Out Boy, and the biographer is like, “Really, Pete? Really?” and I kind of want to shake him because Pete Wentz is obviously a dramatic person and he feels disappointments keenly and he made that statement literally just as they were finding out they wouldn’t be able to do it, like, of course it’s just hyperbole! The biographer is weird through that whole section of the book because he never once mentions that, as a consolation to Pete, Patrick stayed up all night with him so they could get the record of most interviews by a duo in a twenty-four-hour period, like, that’s what I would have said about that story instead of trying to get way more out of Pete’s off-the-cuff self-pity (which is just so Pete Wentz, it’s like this writer hasn’t just spend a hundred pages writing about him…).

· Whenever I read about how many songs Patrick shows up with when it’s time to record an album, I always feel this little twinge of solidarity with him, like, sometimes that’s just how it is in your chosen creative medium, you’re just always endlessly writing.

· I had never thought before about the fact that Pete says all the time that he was too selfish pre-hiatus, all the time, a lot, that’s how he describes his problem – and the fact that there’s an entire song on Truant Wave called “Love, Selfish Love” with the line “God bless the sad and selfish” and I’m just going to…sit here and think about who in Patrick’s life could be described as sad and selfish.

· From the bio re: Soul Punk: It’s disarming to hear this garrulous boy-next-door sing so candidly about sex. Yeah, I don’t think you were paying attention to the way Patrick smirks at the camera in the music videos, buddy.

· Detail I knew but had never really thought about before: that Pete got Patrick to really click into songwriting with him again by giving him a puzzle. Patrick says that sometimes Pete gives him homework assignments, “I want a song that sounds like x, y, and z,” and Patrick will be like, “That’s impossible,” but also so intrigued that he ends up sitting and writing the thing. The fact that Pete knew, after a few mediocre songs neither of them liked, like, “You know how I snag him? This way,” is adorable. Also, the fact that it was Pete who adored the song to come out of it, “Where Did the Party Go?,” and that it was his excitement over the song that made Patrick think, Okay, maybe we can do this, like, it was Pete’s joy that drove Patrick’s optimism, they’re so creatively linked, these two.

· He does include the detail that Pete was worried he’d fallen behind during the hiatus because he didn’t spend much time playing music and so he committed himself to practicing and improving with metronome work, like, Pete Wentz ugh <3. In a very recent interview that I cannot blame the bio for not including, Pete said that Patrick helps him with the bass because he’s so musically talented and everything about that offhand statement just kills me.

· I did not know that one of the leaks of their reunion was on a blog that wrote “You can stop refreshing for a journal update,” and I’m in love with that, sorry.

· Ugh, can I just say, the fact that Patrick sang all of his vocals for Pax AM Days live with the band is just so unbelievable, he kills me.

· From the bio: “We were fireworks that went off too soon / And I miss you in the June gloom, too,” Stump sings here, and you can’t help but wonder if the words refer to his public but brief marriage. …I have indeed helped the wondering of that because I have never once thought that about this song lolololol

#long post #peterick #pete wentz #fall out boy #fob #bandom

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junietuesday · 5 years

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I JUST SAW THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL AND AAAAAAAA

(October 19, 2019 show, 2:00 PM)

IT WAS LITERALLY THE MOST AWESOME THING!!!! THE CAST WAS SO SO SO INCREDIBLE, THERE WAS LITERALLY NO WEAK VOICE. I WAS GONNA START LISTING MY FAVORITES BUT IT TURNED INTO ME JUST NAMING ALL THE CHARACTERS BC THEY WERE ALL SO GOOD, I WAS SLIGHTLY WORRIED WHEN GOING IN IF THEY WERE GONNA BE AS GOOD AS THE ORIGINALS BUT HONESTLY I LOVED THIS CAST MORE. SERIOUSLY IT WAS SO AMAZING EVEN MY PARENTS, HARSH CRITICS ABOUT THEATER, HAD SO MUCH PRAISE

Act 1

When introducing Plankton they put a magnifying glass in front of the tiny puppet and had a circle in the middle of the projections to show his expressions

The story is a lot deeper than I thought it’d be, the fish blamed Sandy for the volcano bc she was a “land mammal” and kept telling her to “go back to her home” and that kind of thing, people marched around chanting “blame the squirrel! blame the squirrel!” and the actor was wearing a thing with silhouettes of people with pitchforks and torches (at the end of “Hero Is My Middle Name” she kicked a sign with those words in half, good for her)

During “Super Sea Star Savior”, Spongebob and Sandy kept waving frantically at Patrick and gesturing to him to leave but he just kept on singing, then Spongebob and Patrick had a fight afterward like

Spongebob, insultingly: you’re pink!

Patrick: you’re square! square! SQUARE! *storms off*

OH and for their team name they were like “SpongeRick or PatBob?” and I DIED bc it was like ship names i’m sure

At the beginning Karen told Plankton irritatedly “twenty years of marriage kinda takes out the passion”, then they fell more and more in love during the act until at the end when Plankton was talking about his scheme and cackling she said “I forgot how much I love it when you scheme”, and her screen had fire playing on it as she said “the end of the world adds SPICE to a relationship” and they ran offstage together

They changed a lot of the lyrics, especially at the beginnings of the songs, I was so devastated when they removed Karen’s beatboxing (so basically Plankton needed a way to convince all the fish to go in his escape pod, he said “give me some music, Karen” and she did a bunch of weird melodies and he said “no, we need something people will LISTEN to. give me a BEAT, Karen, we’ll do hip-hop” and she said “you couldn’t rap to save your life”, and Plankton went all serious and said “try me” and the song started, he had a dance break and a super fast rap in the middle I couldn’t catch the words of), then again maybe the changes were just so the story would flow on its own in the soundtrack and they’ve always been like that? idk i haven’t really been in the spongebob musical fandom

The mayor was fucking hilarious, she was like “don’t trust the media!! the government has EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL” and kept saying things like “stay calm, we’re taking steps to assemble a committee to put together a counterproposal to action” (yeah)

Pearl didn’t have her high belting in “Daddy Knows Best”, she had CRAZY AWESOME riffing instead she was so cool i love her, also before the song she was holding up two dresses (one long and one short both pink and frilly) and said “which should I wear to the Electric Skates?” and Mr. Krabs handed them both off to Spongebob, who put the short one on over his outfit by the hanger, later he pulled the skirt up to cover his eyes the whole song after Mr. Krabs told him before starting to sing “close your eyes, this isn’t for you Spongebob”

PATRICK STOOD RIGHT NEXT TO US IN THE AISLE DURING BIKINI BOTTOM DAY, I SAW ACTORS WALKING DOWN THE AISLES SO I TURNED TO SEE WHO WAS NEAR US AND I NEARLY SHRIEKED WHEN I SAW IT WAS PATRICK

During “Hero Is My Middle Name” Spongebob had to keep prompting Patrick to join in at the beginning, and then when they finally convinced Sandy, first Sandy cartwheeled to the middle, then Spongebob, then Patrick jumped with his hands in the air toward the center like he wanted to join in but didn’t know how to cartwheel

I FINALLY KNOW WHAT THE CHORUS OF “When the Going Gets Tough” MEANS IT’S “SO LET’S GO AND BEGONE” LMAOOO I CAN’T BELIEVE IT TOOK ME SO LONG

a bit after “No Control”, this old lady fish grabbed a canned drink off a cart and said “I’m gonna do all the living I didn’t do before! Carpe diem!” and gulped the drink down, and the girl running the stand stormed forward and demanded “who are you calling a carp??”

so before “When the Going Gets Tough” the mayor was asking for ideas and Patrick raised his hand and said “ooh ooh ooh!!! i have one!!! maybe if we close our eyes, nothing will happen!!!”, which was immediately shut down, later at Patrick’s rock, where he was scratching his belly button with a stick, sardines showed up and bowed and said that they heard Patrick’s plan and asked for more wisdom, he stood up and said “um. uh, my belly button itches? and then it doesn’t”, the sardines lit up and said “yes, yes, all suffering passes! more wisdom more wisdom!” and Patrick made a sweeping gesture near his face with the stick and said “life...smells...life smells...” he took a deep breath while the stick was near his nose, and made a face, and said “life smells weird”, the sardines thanked him and ran off chanting “life smells weird! life smells weird! life smells weird!”

Oh and also before “When the Going Gets Tough” Sandy tried to explain the science of the volcano, Plankton scoffed and said “you’re gonna believe this squirrel’s ‘science’? Next she’ll be telling us that tidal warming is real”

During a scene in the Krusty Crab when Spongebob was trying to have a soliloquy about how Mr. Krabs wouldn’t trust him as manager, he started to belt a note but only got like one beat in before the sea started shaking and the lights went red, he looked confused for a moment after it died down and the lights went back blue and he tried to belt again, then more tremors and the lights went red again, eventually after like 3 times of this happening he gave up and Squidward said “is this something we should be concerned about?” and Spongebob said “nahh”, then the news reporter came on and announced “THIS IS SOMETHING YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED ABOUT”

Act 2

Mt. Humongous was a bunch of cardboard boxes stacked on three frames on wheels, people moved them around onstage while Spongebob and Sandy climbed on them, it was really cool

At the top of the mountain, which was made of a ton of ladders, Spongebob was twisting himself through the rungs and hanging upside AS HE SUNG and holy shit it was so awesome

The Electric Skates told Squidward he could perform at the concert to raise funds for the escape pod if he gave them certain items—they handed over the list and it scrolled so long it rolled offstage—and when he finally got them (dropping the rolled-up list and causing the red bag to “meow”), they told him what basically amounted to “lol you’re a loser” and Squidward indignantly went “nononono no no NO i am NOT a loser”, queue the song when the Electric Skates leave

At the end Karen and Plankton walked in arguing furiously like your typical married couple, then Plankton yelled “EVIL SCHEME!!” and everyone on stage turned to him and they froze and Plankton said “did I say that too loud?” and Mr. Krabs marched up to Plankton and said super angrily “I KNEW IT!! I KNEW IT WAS AN EVIL SCHEME YOU [*dolphin noises*]”, everyone gasped and first Sandy covered Spongebob’s ears then Spongebob covered his own ears when Plankton yelled back “I’M NOT A [*dolphin noises*], YOU’RE A [*dolphin noises*]” and people were looking scandalized and Patrick was covering his eyes lol

During the finale, confetti cannons went off multiple times when all the characters were jamming out on their instruments onstage, and then people tossed these big blowup bubbles out into the audience for people to bump around (i was too far back to touch one and i saw people leaving the theater with some SO JEALOUS), and then after the bows and the Spongebob Squarepants theme song, fish went around popping confetti blowers as they walked around the aisles, i grabbed some bits

“I’m Not a Loser” was perfection live, the crowd went nuts when the sea anemone chorus line formed a kickline. but wait at the end of the song when the chorus line disappeared and his big sparkly jacket and hat were gone he went “i’m not—” and just stopped and looked around and went quietly “alone” :(

after Spongebob, Patrick, and Sandy returned to Bikini Bottom where everyone was arguing with each other, Spongebob screamed “STOP!!” to get everyone to shut up and Plankton said “you’re alive??” (bc he’d shot an avalanche machine at Mt. Humongous to kill Spongebob and Sandy), Spongebob said “yes! thank you for your concern!! Plankton is the only one here who still has decency!!”

OH and Karen came up with the plan to kill Sandy and Spongebob, she brought out the Avalanche Maker 3000, Plankton asked her where she found it and Karen said “in the cleaning supplies closet under the Tidal Wave Maker 2000, the Tornado Maker 5000, and the mop”, Plankton took a deep breath and said something like “this smells like victory...and lemon spray”

Spongebob fell down the mountain and Sandy tried to grab his hand and said “hold on! I got you!” but his arm just kept on stretching

Before “Chop to the Top”, Sandy was trying to raise Spongebob’s spirit and said “remember karate rule number one” and Spongebob said “never let the sands of time into your shorts, or they will chafe” and wiggled his hips, then Sandy said “oh right, karate rule number two then” and then started singing

At the beginning of the act, Spongebob told Gary when he woke up, “oh I had a nightmare the world was ending today at sundown and that Patrick abandoned me. which obviously could never happen” and then the news announcer went “BREAKING STORY! THE WORLD ENDS TODAY AT SUNDOWN. AND FRIENDS ARE ABANDONING FRIENDS” and Spongebob just started screaming at the top of his lungs and then the narrator went “Ten minutes later” and they projected one of the timeskip screens and then Spongebob was still screaming, then “one hour later” he was lying down on his side still screaming, then “50 years later”, and if that isn’t the biggest mood

#spongebob the musical #spongebob broadway #spongebob bway #the spongebob musical #what do i tag this as #june speaks #june experiences the magic of theater

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colonel-insomniac · 4 years

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So there’s not that much anywhere for Patbob Spongerick, and while it is not necessarily mentioned outright, I decided to take it upon myself to add to the community. Let me know what you think!!!

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“You’re just too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off of you…”

Bobby Porous danced to Frank Sinatra’s cover of the song I Love You Baby. In his mind, the music was all pinks and greens, flowers and their leaves, maybe a little hint of gold, too.

He’d been listening to the song on a loop for the past hour and a half, and so consequently, his hair was sticking slightly to his forhead. The strands pressed to his forehead had turned from their natural shade of burnt orange to a coppery kind of red-orange admist the sweat.

“At long last love has arrived, And I thank God I’m alive…”

Bobby supposed that it wasn’t really dancing; he mainly was jumping around his living room, spinning around the room, and weird arm gestures that weren’t really anything. He was having fun though, and really, that was all that mattered to him.

It’d been a couple days since the volcano incident, and Bobby tried his best not to remember those two days, and preferred to push them to the back of his mind. He had to deal with the nightmares at night, on his own. But he had Gary, so maybe he wasn’t really alone. The day the volcano was supposed to erupt, he told the citizens of his beach town that he wasn’t scared, that as long as they had each other, they’d be fine, but he was terrified. Sandy looked like a shell of her former self, Patrick looked scared and stayed as close to Bobby as he could, his hand seeking out some sort of contact from him. As for Bobby, he just knew his face was smudged with dirt and soot, streaked with tears and sweat.

He wasn’t sure where that left him with his friends, when they didn’t burn alive. Yeah, they’d held the concert in celebration of not…dying, and even Edward had praised Bobby, but he wasn’t sure what was happening in the world around him. After the concert ended, he managed to slip away while everyone was distracted, and hid himself away in his home. After those two days, he needed the alone time, and since then, he hasn’t left the house. He hasn’t turned on the TV, or checked any of his messages, or updates on social media, nothing.

And well, here he is, trying to heal from the horrors of facing his mortality. He’d downloaded the song to his phone as a result of the echoes of the song in his head, the earworm whispering the tune as he hummed along to what he could remember of the chorus.

“The sight of you leaves me weak, there are no words left to speak…”

And so he danced. Not good, but no one was watching him, so what did it matter?

Thoughts of his best friend just kept flooding his mind, and thinking of Pat with Sinatra’s singing made Bobby feel a desperation that just kept clawing at him. It made his heart beat faster, and made him feel like he needed to go to Patrick. He so badly wanted to let himself loose, running until he reached Pat’s house, just two houses down. But everytime he got to the door, he couldn’t bring himself to open the door just yet.

God, it left him so conflicted, and every single time, he had to take the music with him to the bathroom where he just sat under the spray of hot water. It killed the mood, leaving Bobby numb. It didn’t help that his phone screen lit up with a message from Pat at least once an hour. Bobby’s stomach churned with nerves mixed with the longing to respond and just invite Pat over, pretend that nothing happened. He felt guilty, though he shouldn’t, and it made it almost impossible not to cry.

“Oh pretty baby, don’t bring me down I pray…”

Three and a half knocks on a door echoed through Bobby’s house, a code between him and Pat, so they knew it was the other. For a split second, Bobby forgot that he gave Pat a spare key, and hoped that maybe Pat forgot, too. He wasn’t ready to face him yet.

But maybe Bobby’s luck was all used up when they defeated the volcano, when the heat licked Bobby’s face in waves as he dropped the Eruptor Interrupter into the bright orang-yellow lava. Bobby reaches out of his curled postition and reaches towards the faucet, and makes the water searingly cold. It soothes the phantom heat when he thinks about that day.

Footsteps grow louder outside, and Bobby knows from the gait that it has to be Patrick. The shower curtain jerks close, but only after his sweet Gary hops onto the ledge at the back of the tub, away from the water.

“Now that I’ve found you stay, and let me love you, baby, let me love you…”

“Bobby?” Pat’s voice rings in Bobby’s head, the first voice he’s heard in days, apart from his own and Sinatra’s.

Bobby’s breath catches in his throat, a dry sob. “Are you okay, buddy?” Pat asks, approaching the curtain but sitting on the ground and leaning his back against the tub.

“Yeah.” his voice is a whisper, probably inaudible to Pat over the sound of water hitting the floor of the tub. So he repeats the word a little louder.

“I haven’t…you haven’t talked to me in days and I was—scared. I don’t know what I thought but…I wouldn’t blame you if you’re still mad at me, you know?” Patrick’s thoughts stumble over each other in Bobby’s mind, tripping over one another as he tries to get to the one that’s most important to him.

“I’m not mad.” Bobby says, simply, knowing he won’t leave it at that. Bobby’s been told he has issues with being quiet. “I just….” He trails off, thinking.

“You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. Just thought maybe I oughta stop pitying myself when you didn’t reach out to me and check on you face to face.” Pat sounds unsure of himself, and it makes Bobby’s heart splinter.

“It’s just that it’s been hard, since…y’know, and I can’t stop thinking all the time.” Bobby lowers his head and rests it on a knee, watching the water lap at his toes before going down the drain.

“I wanna hold you so much, at long last love has arrived…”

A hand appears in the tub from the outside, and Bobby’s eyes focus on that, knowing that the hand belongs to Pat. Hesitantly, he reaches over and places his small hand inside his best friends bigger one. Bobby always thought their hands fit like pieces in a puzzle, they belong together, whether it be as best friends or more. Bobby thinks he’d be scared to take that leap, if it came to that.

“Jeez, Sponge,” Pat uses his nickname for Bobby. Sponge, because he takes everything from everyone— “your hand’s freezing. You have to get out of there before you die.”

That manages to tease a small laugh out of Bobby, because even he knows that isn’t possible. “It helps.” He replies when Pat turns the water off. He’d had to search for a bit before he found the faucet, probably because Pat didn’t wanna invade Bobby’s privacy like that. “I always feel like the heat from the volcano is still searing my skin.”

The curtain is flung open, and a towel chucked his way. Bobby notices Pat is looking straight up at the ceiling, away from Bobby. That scares Bobby, and makes his eyes brim with tears. Bobby tells himself he’s being irrational, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling. He buries his face in his towel and wraps it around his freckled body when he’s dry. Only then does Pat look at him for the first time in days.

“I love you baby, and if it’s quite alright, I need you baby…”

“Bobby, look in the mirror, your lips are blue.” Bobby glances at his reflection and immediately thinks of the Coral Blue Number 2 Semi-Gloss Lipstick, a joke from the time he, Squidward, and Mr Krabs went on a celebration vacation. He smiles slightly at the memory, a wisp of a good thought crossing his face in the mirror.

“Bobby?” He shifts his eyes towards Pat’s reflection, listening. “Go get dressed. You’re naked and in a towel.” Pat states, and Bobby smiles, the first one in days. Gary follows close behind as Bobby takes the brief walk to his room, and throws on the first pair of PJ shorts and shirts that his hand touches. For the first time in what seems to be forever, Bobby doesn’t even care if they match or not.

“Star?” Bobby calls out to Patrick, the nickname slipping out of habit.

“In the library.” Pat’s voice calls out. Spongebob honestly doesn’t know how he managed to get a library in his house, but it definitely was the most expensive part of his house. He wanted to create a space that felt safe, while also allowing him to keep up with his obsession with collecting books.

Bobby notes how filled the shelves are, a couple spaces left. It makes him wonder what will come next, after all this.

“Trust in me when I say…”

He doesn’t want this to be it for him and Pat. They came this far, and Pat was likely still beating himself up over leaving Bobby in the first place. There’s no reason he shouldn’t just forgive Pat right now.

It’s been days, he needs to make up his mind.

“So….” Bobby starts, unsure of what to say, but knowing he was only slightly uncomfortable.

Patrick doesn’t say anything, just opens his arms. An invitation.

Bobby feels as though time has frozen. He wonders what would happen if he walked away now. Was time actually frozen, or were things processing slowly, just like when Pat saved him on the volcano?

This is a decision that Bobby knows will either reinforce their feelings or have them walk away, on two separate paths. This is a leap, not a step, not a jump. It’s a leap of faith, and like Sandy said, “If you wait, it’s too late, you’re defeated.”

It’s like trying to jump over a chasm. Terrifying, heading into the unknown.

Bobby walks forward, towards Pat. As soon as he’s able, Pat’s arms wrap around Bobby, whose cheek rests on Patrick’s chest. Pat rests his chin on the top of Bobby’s head. Suddenly, it’s as though Bobby knows that it’s okay that not everything is fine.

“I’m so sorry.” He mutters to Pat.

“You don’t need to be, buddy, I was the one who made the mistake, not you, and I promise that I’ll never do it again.”

Bobby feels his face warm up, and finally, finally something else other than guilt and desperate sorrow fill him. He hugs Pat tighter.

When they separate, they find their hand is holding the others.

Bobby bites his bottom lip in thought, eyebrows scrunching together as Pat looks at him, curiosity laced in his eyes. Eventually, Bobby nods, a small smile gracing his face as he shares what he imagines Sinatra would agree with—sharing music means you need to project it from what you’re feeling.

Bobby sings the song this time, imagining the music surrounding him, finally bringing the color back to the world.

“And let me love you baby…”

“Pat, I love you.” Bobby says, when he finishes the final note.

“Love you too, Bobby.” Pat replies, smiling when Bobby stands on tiptoe and places a kiss on Pat’s cheek.

“Let me love you….”

#spongebob #patrick #the spongebob musical #the spongebob musical live on stage #volcano #patbob spongerick #patbob #spongerick #sandy #mr krabs #squidward #bikini bottom

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ta-ether · 6 years

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a callout post for hadestown but a nice one where i just gush about the actors

nabyiah be: she’s like a smokey soprano, which i didn’t think existed? haven’t found another one yet. i love how she plays eurydice with such a strong soul yet with such vulnerability. i think eurydice in hadestown is a hard character to get right because she is caught between “i’m hungry” and love and nabyiah be manages to play her perfectly while also looking amazing. it’s not super important, but like, her eurydice is so beautiful and her hair is just. the best. i love it. i love it!

damon duanno: maybe my second favorite tenor? which is very high praise because first is michael arden. i really love a good tenor and damon duanno kills every song he’s in. orpheus in hadestown is a lot like eurydice in how you have to walk a line with the character. it would be so so easy to hate orpheus cos on paper he’s actually kind of the worst? but damon duanno plays him very good natured and naive and i just. can’t hate him.

amber grey: ahhhh i love her! just, everything about her persephone is perfect. i love how she still loves hades, but that love has changed. it sounds like i don’t have a ton to say but that’s just because it’s hard to just write a paragraph about how good she is and not 10 page essay on her acting choices while playing persephone. prob my fave part is “you think they’ll make it? (i don’t know) hades, you let them go (i let them try) and how about you and i? do you think we’ll make it? (it’s almost spring. try again next fall.) wait for me? (i will)” because amber grey sounds so young? and i’m pretty sure that it’s actually just how she talks, but when she sings persephone she sounds so much older and jaded, but here she sounds young and unsure and it breaks my heart.

patrick page: hey little songbird always makes everyone who i make listen to it do a double take. there aren’t enough bass roles out there but they’re all great. patrick page is such a good actor -- it would be really easy just to make hades a straight villian, but his acting combined with the lyrics make a genuinely complex person. special shoutout to build a wall which is always so sinister without being so caught up in it’s modern applicability. and the sunglasses. and “i missed ya.”

chris sullivan: there’s this moment where hermes goes “guess it’s time to go” in way down hadestown and chris sullivan delivers it with like? whimsical menace? it’s a spicy meatball! so good! his sadness at the beginning of road to hell ii always makes what happened real even though the outcome was known already. it’s good shit.

lulu fall, jessie shelton, shaina taub: are getting grouped together. anyway, the fates are so good -- i love how they serve as the greek chorus and also help enforce the fact that everything in this story’s inevitable. their harmonies are also just *chef’s kiss* and their voices blend in this lovely sort of weird almost dissonance? their costumes are also A+++. special love to lulu fall who was also an amazing helene understudy and she doesn’t get enough appreciation.

special crew shoutouts:

rachel chokin: was robbed at the tony’s. i can’t wait to see what else she does. there aren’t a ton of female directors of musicals and i hope she inspires more.

anais michell: hadestown would be nothing without the music and lyrics. the music is so powerful and interesting and new, and the lyrics are all good with some special moments of genius. one of my faves is from hermes: “i’ll tell you where the real road lies. inside your ears, behind your eyes. that is the path to paradice, and likewise the road to ruin.” the best song is wait for me and wait for me ii. lyrics + music + performace is all batting 1000.

#hadestown

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donttellpeterparker · 6 years

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Am I Drunk?

Summary: Hello could i have 27 and 34 for Peter Parker from the promp list?

Requested: Yes

Word Count: 1.9k

Warning(s)?: None

PROMPT LIST

masterlist (x) requests (x)

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Am I Drunk?

You found it silly getting ready for some stupid party which you never really intended on going to in the first place. Flash had popped up to both you and Liz, inviting you both over to another one of his infamous parties. It had taken Liz all of three seconds to agree, immediately deciding to drag you along with her. You were more than happy to stay at home, watching netflix on your couch, nose deep in chocolate chip ice cream.

''So, what are you going to wear?'' It had reached the end of the school day, you had successfully avoided the topic till now. With an exasperated sigh you closed your locker shut.

''I'm thinking clothes, maybe some shoes as well with-''

''Ha ha'' Liz spoke sarcastically, cutting you off. You just smirked in response and turned to face her with yuor arms crossed.

''Do I really have to go?'' You pouted.

''Yes you have to go! Is that even a question!?'' She screeched.

''Well technically it was'' Liz happily rolled her eyes at you before pulling playfully on your arm to lead you out of the crowded hallways. You knew you were going to be there whether you wanted to be or not, they weren't all bad but not really fun either, just a bunch of horny teenagers trying to dry hump each other in a crowded living room or back yard, again, nothing special.

''In fact, I have the perfect outfit for you!'' Liz happily exclaims.

Yay me.

You were greeted by the smell of alcohol and smoke as soon as you opened the front door to Flash's grand home. Rich bastard.

''Hey, glad you could make it!'' Flash sings out to you once he sees you. You just laugh lightly and roll your eyes, immediately walking past him and over to the kitchen counter to pour yourself a drink. Where the hell was Liz?

Peter's pov#

''House party in the suburbs! Oh I remember these!'' Aunt May speaks excitedly. However I couldn't help but to let my breathing hitch inside my throat due to the amount of nerves I was currently experiencing. Ned, however, sat quite comfortably in the back, seeming to enjoy the ride far more than I was.

''It will be a night to remember'' Ned says with double meaning. Funnily enough I gulped at his words, knowing what he was meaning by the second one.

''Ned some hats wear the men but you wear that hat'' May praises Ned with a toothy smile.

''Thanks it gives me confidence'' Yeah I wish it would have given me some.

''This is a mistake...'' I murmur, watching the flock of people make their way inside of flash's house. I quickly turn around and frown at May.

''May let's just go home''

''Oh Peter... I know, I know it's really hard, trying to fit in with all the changes you body's going through... it's flowering now'' She jokes. I gave her a dead pan look, clearly not in the mood for this. She glances between Ned and I before sighing.

''He's been really stressed out lately'' she states aloud.

''What helps with stress is going to a party... is actually going to a party'' Ned encourages from the back seat with his usual tone.

''Yeah, yeah I'm going'' I got the hint loud and clear. I soon hoped out of the car followed by Ned.

''Peter!'' I quickly turn back around and lean in towards the window with my eyebrows raised.

''Have fun okay?'' she says smiling. I smile in response and nod.

''Okay I will''

''Bye Aunt May!'' Ned happily calls out, waving his arm as I leaned back away from the window, Aunt May slowly beginning to drive off. As soon as I turned around from the car and made my way towards Ned side he grabbed me by the wrist with a serious look.

''Dude you got the suit right?'' Instead of replying I slowly lift my shirt sleeve up to reveal the blue and red suit hidden underneath. Ned smiles proudly and begins to do a little skip to his step.

''This is gonna change our lives!''

Ned was the one to lean forward to open the front door, peering inside first before I could. He stood still to take in the view of our first ever party. I froze beside him aswell, blown away that I was actually here!

''Okay we're going to have spider-man swing in, say you guys are tight, then I get one of the fist bump, beo hand shake things-'' Ned could have kept talking I wasn't too sure and I didn't really care at the moment. In the corner of my eye I saw another body walk into the house, keeping her head down then soon raises it to look around. I could feel my test tighten once I realised who it was.

''Hey! Glad you could make it'' Flash's voice spoke, breaking the girl from her trance. She seemed to ignore him, making her way past him as she walked over to the kitchen. I couldn't help but to smile at the fact that she also hated Flash as much as I did.

''Well if it isn't the Midtown Losers'' Great. Ned finally seemed to stop enjoying the view of the party and glanced in front of us to notice Flash standing with a red solo cup in his hand.

''Hey Flash'' Ned said, his cheery attitude now disappearing. I soon felt Ned again drag me by my arm, over towards the drinks table. He really expected me to drink?

''It'll ease your nerves''

Y/n's pov#

It had only been an hour since you had arrived and there was still no sign of your best friend. You were close to just leaving the party all together, the alcohol only made you tolerate this party for so long before your brain kicked in. With a sigh you had left your spot on the couch next to two making out couples and walked over to the back door, opening it up to reveal the relatively quiet back yard.

Finally some peace and quite. Oh so you thought....

There was a shadow in the distance, sitting down on one of the back yard hairs over looking the extensive garden to this mansion like home. You glanced around, soon noticing that it was the only chair out here unless you wanted to sit on the ground. You slowly began to walk over, soon becoming quiet once you heard faint whispering coming from the person sitting down.

''God I'm such an idiot...'' You could just make out as you approached closer and closer.

''Such a damn idiot...'' You didn't want to intrude but whoever it was, seemed to be having some type of conflict. But at the moment you didn't really care either way, you were five vodka cruisers in and just wanted to sit down. The shadow glanced up as soon as they heard movement. You decided to plop yourself down beside the person, not bothering to glance in their direction as you placed your drink on the ground.

''Uh h-h-i'' This had sparked your interest. You turned your head to the side and softly smiled once you saw a familiar boy sitting beside you. What was his name again? Liam? Mason?... Patrick?

''Hey'' You responded casually, seeming to take him by surprise.

''Couldn't take the party either?'' The guy seemed to speak up with no stutter this time, only with a slight slur to his words. You leaned your back into the chair, rolling your head to the side.

''No, my friend ditched me, you?'' Peter froze up, noticing how your body had seemed to move closer towards his. He wasn't sure if it was the drinks making his body warm or if it was your close proximity.

''Mine's inside having the time of his life'' He spoke up with a humorless laugh. You couldn't help but to laugh along with him, feeling the first genuine smile appear on your face from the whole day. You turned your head to the side to get a good look at him, smiling with a slight giggle as he gave you a confused expression with slightly tinted cheeks.

''What?'' You where now making Peter feel extremely nervous.

''You look familiar'' You giggle, the alcohol now starting to take it's effect.

''We do share English, Hone group and Lab together'' Peter hadn't meant to list but he did, instantly cursing himself underneath his breath. You giggled.

''I know silly, Patrick right?'' You asked.

''Peter'' You giggled again, it was a cute name.

''Are you drunk?'' he asked, a slur now becoming clear in your voice.

''No you're just really, really blurry'' You answer honestly with another giggle. This time, Peter laughed along with you. The serenity of the night was almost peaceful, the faint sound of the music from inside with the garden lights reflecting off of the plants and flowers.

''You know you're cute when you're staring off into space'' You hiccuped, leaning even closer towards Peter without meaning too. Peter blushed, feeling his heart rate begin to increase.

''T-thanks?'' He stuttered, not sure on how to respond. Once again you giggled, your drunkingly self deciding to lay down across the chair and into his lap. Peter grew stuff, suddenly feeling and seeing your face on his lap, a smile dancing across your lips.

He was incredibly comfortable to lay on.

''We're friends now'' You stated like it was obvious. Peter just nodded his head agreeing with you, not knowing what else to do.

''O-okay'' You giggled at how adorable he looked when confused.

''You're definitely my prince charming, you know that?'' Peter was beyond confused on what you were talking about but he didn't care, just as long as you didn't stop.

''Why's that?'' Peter asked warily, still staring at you in his lap.

''Because you look at me as if I'm the only girl in the world-hiccup- and you're really nice-hiccup- and sweet- hiccup- and really really handsome'' You had watched his eyebrows furrow together in confusion as another blush coated his cheeks.

''I've watched you silly!'' You knew sober you wouldn't have blurted this out but drunk you had no filter.

''You've w-w-watched me?'' Peter asked, a hint of hope in his tone.

''And you're really smart too... but you always disappear all the time... why is that?'' You asked, as if you were a toddler demanding answers to how babies are born. Peter had found absolutely the cutest thing ever.

You watched Peter with a smile on your face, watching the way his lips seemed to pull upwards as he did. They had looked so soft and inviting...

''I really want to kiss you right now...'' You blurted out, starring at his lips with want. Peter had soon stopped smiling and just stopped to stare at you in complete shock, did those words just seriously leave your mouth?

''W-w-what?'' But before anything else you could soon feel yourself grow tired.

''I'll kiss you tomorrow?'' You asked aloud, soon closing your eyes not waiting for a response. You had soon fallen fast asleep on Peter's lap, him left completely flabbergasted.

Wait till he tells Ned what had just happened.

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A/N: I actually don't like this omg, just pure fluff for my babes!!! I have been feeling really down lately and I feel as if my work is getting worse and worse for some reason... I'm sorry! xoxo

#peter parker #peter parker imagines #peter parker fluff #peter parker x reader #tom holland #tom holland imagines #tom holland imagine #tom holland x reader #spider-man #spiderman imagine #spider-man: homecoming #donttellpeterparker #am i drunk

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mindrazerofficial · 3 years

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Vin Verducci: The Wild Man of East Hanover

From time to time, we have been known to affectionately refer to our beloved bass player Vin as “Hawky”. This nickname is a reference to our collective favorite TV Show Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Frank (Danny DeVito) forms a gang of singing old men and to intimidate a business man. In the climax of the show, Frank introduces Hawky who is “crazy”, he goes on to explain that he doesn’t know what Hawky is capable of. Hawky proceeds to drop dead on this man’s front stoop. In today’s blog, I am going to share with you the series of events that earned Vin the same nickname.

When you first meet Vin, you are presented with a mild mannered, soft spoken, intelligent guy. Nothing out of the ordinary really. But once he gets comfortable the layers begin to peel and you begin to get a glimpse of the wild man within. If you hang out with him enough, which we do as we are all close friends outside of the band, you start to accumulate fun Vin stories. Here are some of the best ones.

You might be surprised by this fact but Vin hadn’t been to many concerts before joining the band. He had gone to some more low key or mellow shows but nothing truly METAL. So we collectively as a band decided to go see our favorite french death metal act, Gojira at Brooklyn Steel. The whole ride in to the city, Vin was bellyaching about the mosh pits. He said things like “I don’t want to go into the mosh pit”, “Nick, don’t throw me in the mosh pit”, “Nick, seriously, don’t throw me in the mosh pit. I MEAN IT” and so on. So we arrive and get a good spot in the crowd a few rows back from the stage and just right of center stage, there is a small pit during Converge’s set and none of us jumped in. But as soon as Mario Duplantier began the intro to Only Pain the pit opened up right on us and Vin was at the center. Our whole group sans Vin got pushed up to the front and weren’t able to get back to the pit until mid way through the set. Once we were able to push back what did we see? Vin at the center of the pit, drenched in other people’s sweat, shirtless, having the time of his life. He was the master of the pit. We never saw that shirt again. Some time later, we went to see Metallica in Philly and the same thing happened, we lost Vin for a time and found him shirtless in the mosh pit. Now he asks Nick to throw him in the mosh pit. Fucking metal.

Another classic was right after our performance at Don Jamieson’s Fourth of July Metal festival at Brighton Bar in Long Branch, NJ. We had a mid afternoon set and decided to hit the beach after before we came back for the headliners, Unlocking the Truth. At the beach we hung out with another band who performed at the show but hung around after they left for dinner. We aren’t quite sure how this came up but we eventually became entangled in a vigorous discussion about Chistopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knight particularly the metallic nature of Christian Bale’s Batman voice. As we were discussing. Vin got up and sprinted off towards a middle aged man. He accosted this man and screamed in the best death growl he could “WHERE ARE THEY”, a quote from said film and then ran off. We all stood in shock and confusion, perhaps equally confused as the man who bore the brunt of this performance. We then set out to find him. As we left the beach, we ran into two of the three members of Unlocking the Truth who witnessed the whole ordeal, also in confusion, as we passed by, we simply said “Have a great show guys”. Some time later we found Vin at an ice cream stand eating one of those SpongeBob ice pops as if nothing had happened. Yeah... I assure you, I was there and I am just as confused as you.

Our personal favorite Vin story is from our trip to the Jersey Shore in the summer of ‘20. This was a wild trip, with some stories a bit to much to share on the internet but this one is a real gem. Prior to our trek, we were all engaged in a long term Dungeons & Dragons campaign that featured a fictitious religion created by our frontman/ dungeon master Nick DeFuria. The religion was an amalgamation of all the worst parts of all the modern religions, intended to poke fun at them. The god of this religion was named Amlahahn and Vin’s character, a lizard man, was a zealous, devout follower of the religion. Anyway, on our second to last night there, Vin decided to lose his mind. On our way back to the end closest to our hotel, Vin mounted a bench and began preaching. He spoke the word of the great, tyrannical one true god Amlahahn. Then the unthinkable happened. People began to gather. A rather sizable crowd amassed around him and genuinely looked interested in what he was saying. Brian, Nick and our close friends Patrick and Evan decided to begin chanting “Praise be to Amlahahn” and astonishingly members of the crowd joined in. And just like that, Vin was a cult leader. Our minds were blown (razed?).

So do you think Vin has earned the right to carry on Hawky’s memory by bearing his nickname? Let us know.

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mg-bsl381 · 6 years

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Holding in her Arms

Sometimes when I look at a picture I see a story behind the image. This was definitely true of this story and I’m sure had absolutely nothing to do with the time I spent looking at the picture!

I hope you like it

And here’s the picture as a little reminder...

Holding in her Arms

Shelagh Turner had held hundreds, possibly even thousands of babies when she was Sister Bernadette. She had delivered them, weighed them at the clinic and even on occasion tried to coax life into their tiny bodies. Midwifery was both her career and her vocation. She had dedicated her life to the babies of Poplar.

It was a vague idea when she fell in love with Patrick that she might one day have a child of her own but it was such an abstract thought that she paid it no heed. It was only when she was recovering from TB in the sanatorium that she dared think of the possibility of motherhood. It was not babies she dreamt of caring for, it was a ten year old boy with an independence borne of necessity and a thirst for knowledge that she recognised as a parallel to her own childhood self. She loved Timothy almost as much as she loved his father.

As she walked down the road lost in the mist, her thoughts kept turning to the future. Of Patrick, of Timothy, of marriage, motherhood and maybe one day a baby of her own. Being able to gaze freely into Patrick’s deep brown eyes she felt the stirrings of a longing to hold their baby in her arms. The longing intensified when she and Patrick cradled Timothy in their arms. He had just been removed from the iron lung and was still very fragile. His once strong legs were as floppy and weak as a newborn. Shelagh wanted to protect Timothy from anything that might happen to him but she knew that she, like Patrick had missed the signs of polio, the disease that came so close to taking him from them. She knew she couldn’t protect the boy from loss either, just as her father couldn’t protect her. She’d once told Patrick that children were resilient but she hoped the remainder of Timothy’s childhood there wouldn’t be a need for resilience.

Holding baby Carole was a glimpse into their future. Shelagh adored cuddling the newborn and Patrick’s loving looks just added to the feeling of rightness. Timothy’s acceptance and wish to keep Carole bode well for his acceptance of a sibling. Handing Carole over at the end of her short stay was so painful. Shelagh felt her as if a piece of her heart was going with Carole and she was never going to be the same again. However she was still hopeful that she would be pregnant soon.

The negative pregnancy test and subsequent trip to Harley Street crushed Shelagh’s hopes and she was lost. She had been so certain of her dream of holding a baby of her own. How could she have got it so wrong? The first ray of hope came with a talk about adoption. Shelagh saw an answer and clung to it with the tenacity of a limpet. She was blind to Patrick’s misgivings and chivvied him in his stalling. All she could see in her mind was the baby she would soon hold in her arms. She was confident they would be accepted as adoptive parents.

The adoption interviewed dashed Shelagh’s hopes once again. She was upset and angry and in that upset and anger she lashed out at Patrick in a way that would be unthinkable to her under any other circumstances. With hindsight Shelagh was distraught that she had been so cruel to the man she loved. Their time of estrangement was agony for her but its one consolation was the love Timothy showed her. His love kept her going when Patrick’s silences filled the flat.

The letter of acceptance was what Shelagh had been waiting for but it came with the knowledge that her home was a deeply unhappy place. The reconciliation with Patrick cemented them together stronger than ever before. Baby Angela was welcomed with joy into a very happy home. Shelagh would never forget the moment when Patrick placed Angela in her arms. It was a dream come true and it felt absolutely right to hold a baby in her arms. Unlike with Carole, this time the adoption agency were there for them to sign the paperwork that transformed Baby Jones into Angela Turner.

Shelagh felt complete. She had two children, a boy and a girl. She was their mother even though neither had come to her in the traditional way. As Angela grew and Shelagh returned to nursing she decided that Angela’s baby things could find a new home. The only thing she kept was a baby’s nightdress. She had sewn it in the early months of her marriage for the baby that she would never carry. She had given it away to Sister Julienne but Sister Julienne was a praying woman and in faith she had kept the nightdress. Angela had worn the nightdress and Shelagh had been grateful for Sister Julienne’s belief that Shelagh would have a child. Every stitch was sewn with love and hope and having parted with it once, Shelagh could not part with it a second time.

Shelagh held many babies as a nurse and a midwife but none were as special as her own children. Timothy was now a teenager with limbs growing at an alarming rate. Angela was not a baby anymore as she chatted merrily away to herself. Shelagh was still astounded by her daughter’s fair hair and dark brown eyes, so like both her and Patrick. A part of her would always long for her own baby but it was an ache and not a constant sense of what might have been. All in all Shelagh was content.

The unexpected realisation that she was pregnant was both exciting and confusing to Shelagh. She had long ago accepted her infertility as without it she wouldn’t have her darling Angela. She was confused as to her feelings both in what she felt and what she perceived she ought to feel. She was excited as she had dreamt of this moment ever since Patrick placed the wedding ring on her finger.

Unfortunately her pregnancy was not as easy as she might have hoped. She had believed that once she conceived her baby would be alright but her scar tissue threatened to take this precious miracle away from her. Bed rest both in hospital away from Patrick and her children was hard for her but being at home unable to do anything was almost worse. She worked until just before her due date as she hated to be idle and it had become increasingly hard for her to hold other people’s babies when all she wanted to do was hold her own.

She had her reasons for not wanting Patrick at the birth. One of the things she loved about him was his dedication as a doctor. However she found it exasperating to be on the receiving end of his medical expertise especially as her pregnancy wore on. Shelagh began to feel less like Patrick’s wife and more like a live-in specimen for him to examine at will. She wanted him to be Patrick and not Dr Turner.

Shelagh’s labour was long and exhausting. She had been with so many mothers in labour but time seemed to pass differently when you were monitoring someone else’s contractions. Sister Julienne was a tower of strength and definitely the right choice of midwife for Shelagh. The suggestion of singing made Shelagh wish she’d picked a more practical midwife such as Nurse Crane. The problem was Shelagh didn’t know what song would suit her best. A song of praise to God was an option but even though her faith was still her faith that didn’t seem like the right thing to sing. Plainsong from her time as Sister Bernadette didn’t feel right either. Sister Bernadette would definitely not have been in this situation. Falling in love had been enough of a shock let alone doing anything about it.

Suddenly she realised what she had to sing. A song to Patrick, her husband. No other song would do. She breathed deeply and began to sing. She finished the line and then heard a voice singing the next line back to her. Shelagh knew in that moment that she wanted and needed Patrick with her when she delivered their baby. Like her, he had witnessed countless births and who was she to deprive him of witnessing the birth of their long-awaited child.

Teddy’s birth was wonderful and Shelagh knew that this was one baby she wasn’t going to have to give away. The feeling of holding his newly born life was amazing. He was warm, slippery and totally hers. It didn’t matter that he was covered in blood and other bodily fluid, to her he was the most beautiful baby ever born. Shelagh held her baby in her arms and felt Patrick’s arms cradling them both.

Later after Shelagh and Teddy had been cleaned up, after Sister Julienne had left to rest and spread the good news of the baby at Nonnatus, Shelagh and Patrick sat cuddled on the bed holding little Teddy.

‘All of them’. Shelagh whispered as she gazed down at her newborn son.

‘All of them? What do you mean my love?’ Asked Patrick gently.

‘After my operation in Harley Street you told me, so many dreams came true.’

‘And you told me, not all of them. Oh Shelagh, oh my love.’

Shelagh felt Patrick kiss her forehead and felt his tear fall down her cheek as he rested his head against hers.

‘All of them.’ Shelagh repeated as she placed the softest kiss on her baby’s head.

Nothing would ever change the way she felt about Timothy or Angela. She was their mother and she did not doubt it for a moment. However Teddy was different. She didn’t treat him any differently but he was truly hers. Hers and Patrick’s. Holding Teddy was holding her own flesh and blood. All her hopes and dreams of a family when she married Patrick were now alive in this little bundle of new life.

#call the midwife #call the midwife fan fiction #shelagh turner #Patrick Turner #my edited screencap #yes I did spend a LOT of time looking at this picture #sorry if this story makes you cry #there is nothing like holding your own baby in your arms

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randombeau · 3 years

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Letter From A Thief

It feels like this year was just stolen from us. Stating the obvious, this has been a really shitty year for a myriad of reasons. This pandemic has stolen concerts, movies, and even going out to a restaurant. It’s made even an introvert like myself go out of his mind. One of the only things saving my sanity has been a handful of albums and tracks released this year that I can listen to while riding a bike or talking a walk around the neighborhood as I continue to wait for the world to come back. It’s been a long time since I’ve been back to this blog and I have to say I’m kinda pissed that I can’t add all the music videos to the list like the past, but that really keeps with the theme of disappointments in 2020. I’m gonna try not to go into these tracks with too much depth like I have in the past, but I’m not promising anything. Just remember this isn’t the best tracks of the year. It’s just the ones I enjoyed the most. Well, I’ve wasted enough time this year so let’s get to this list.

*Here’s a iTunes playlist link for those drinking the Apple Kool-Aid:

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-20-songs-of-2020/pl.u-oZylaMlTAYYJz

20. Genocidal Humanoidz - System of a Down

It’s been 15 freaking years since SOAD released new music and damn it was too long. The group has been rumored for years to be making a new album only to dash the hopes of fans, but 2020 finally saw the band release two new tracks. Always being very political, the increased tensions and fighting between Armenia and the Republic of Artsakh have brought the group out of hiding to drop a pair of bangers. All proceeds raised from the tracks have gone straight to humanitarian needs for displaced families of the war. The lead single, Protect the Land, was the main piece of work that address the bands emotions and feelings on the current situation, but they attached the previously written Genocidal Humanoidz to bring a little more heat and boy do they bring it. Both tracks are worthy of the band they come from, but Genocidal Humanoidz just gets the blood pumping like it’s the early 2000’s again.

https://youtu.be/_74nVpLVn9Q

19. Oh My My - Blue October

Blue October? Aren’t they just a one-hit wonder? Well kinda, as they only pushed into the mainstream stratosphere with their self-destructive anthem “Hate Me” in 2006. There have been a few gems here and there, but nothing that would really catch most people’s ears. However, this new release just has a bouncy infectious beat that draws you in. Just one of those tracks that makes a long car ride feel not that long. In a year that was filled with very little to feel good about this was a nice little bright spot.

https://youtu.be/IRzvkWVWmA0

18. 6 Feet Away - Chromeo

So many bands tried to write songs that captured the feelings and political implications surrounding this pandemic, but nothing worked as well as the funky beats and soothing vocals of David "Dave 1" Macklovitch and Patrick "P-Thugg" Gemayel as they weave a tail of love, attraction, and social responsibility. There are so many clever lyrics that are laced through this jam it’s impressive how easy it’s also to just bob your head to the beat.

https://youtu.be/CPTCrqyf6os

17. I Want More - KALEO

While this track was dropped before the pandemic was in full swing it encapsulates a feeling that a lot of people are experiencing because of it. The singer expresses this longing for emotional connection he is missing, but it’s not nearly as depressing as it sounds. The bluesy track manages to portray a sense of hopefulness that even though this connection is currently missing you feel that he will find it and somehow things will be alright. I think that’s a sentiment everyone wants to share in.

https://youtu.be/iKd4diJRkPo

16. Cyr - Smashing Pumpkins

The Smashing Pumpkins, basically Billy Corgan at this point, have not been at the top of their game in a long time and while the album doesn’t offer a lot of praise, this track harkens back to the Cure/Depeche Mode sounds of the Smashing Pumpkins past. Easy listening synth lines drive the track forward and while the conclusion it pushes towards isn’t exciting the journey to get there is enjoyable.

https://youtu.be/2AN_GRWlU7k

15. Red Skies (feat. Dr. Disrespect) - J + 1

I know, let me explain. First, I’ll admit I’ve been stuck inside for most of this year working from home and I’ve been watching a little too much YouTube and Twitch streams, but dammit is Dr. Disrespect entertaining to watch. This Magnum P.I. mustache, Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon mullet sporting dude just has that je ne sais quoi. That being said, this little track feels like it was plucked right out of the 1980’s or at least from the soundtrack of that cool ass Ryan Gosling film ‘Drive’. The melodic synths that push the song through its sub 3-minute play time just vibe so well that when the guitar comes in the bridge it’s like you’re taking a neon trip to another time. I just love it, sorry not sorry.

https://youtu.be/CakgCPl3mlE

14. Ohms - Deftones

Need me some Deftones, simple as that. Chino and company have delivered an album filled the aggressiveness of a 16-year-old. I’ll admit I didn’t gel with the whole album as much as previous entries, but this title track is a joy to listen to. The speedy guitar riffs and how the track itself just continues to pick up steam as it blazes toward the end is worth the price of entry in itself.

https://youtu.be/KUDbj0oeAj0

13. Phobia - Nothing But Thieves

It’s a known story that on Nirvana’s breakout album, ‘Nevermind’, the band was having a hard time recording the track ‘Lithium’ because Dave Grohl kept speeding the song up to a breakneck pace so they brought in a click track for him to stay on the correct pace. As Dave tells it, having to play to a click track is like having the human part of you just ripped out. In this track, it sounds like the band takes that click track and throws it out the fucking window around the 1:45 mark because this song builds and builds toward a manic conclusion that finishes with an orgasmic ending and if that’s not a human feeling I don’t know what is. In the words of 20-year-old, this track is a fucking banger.

https://youtu.be/vQThlhgiysw

12. The Adults are Talking - The Strokes

Honestly, this entire Strokes album could fill this list. This was my favorite album of the year and I could sit and listen to the whole thing front to back without skipping a track. That doesn’t happen a whole lot. This upbeat opener just sets the stage for an album that feels fresh and peppy. That’s saying something because most of the tracks are hitting around the 5-minute mark yet it never feels like it. The chorus is catchy, the verses are esoteric, and the track goes through several different instrumental shifts that it never gets boring or bogged down. Also, a highlight is Julian’s falsetto, which is actually really great. This track just paved the way for an album that I’d be listening to a lot.

https://youtu.be/ewOPQZZn4SY

11. Caution - The Killers

I’ve been listening to The Killers since 2004 when a friend gave me a copy of their debut album. Been a fan since then and while a lot of what they’ve released in the 2010’s has been a lot of hit or miss, there is always a few catchy gems in each album. This is certainly one of them. The track does lean on some of those Springsteen feelings that the band has become known for, but there’s no denying that The Killers can make some great heartland rock songs. Essentially, that’s what this song is falling back on. Brandon Flowers sings charismatically about how this woman protagonist isn’t going to follow the safe path traveled and she’s gonna throw caution to the wind and follow her dreams. It’s a track with an uplifting story and it’s got some great searing guitar riffs. I’m a simple man, I don’t need much.

https://youtu.be/WrpBgN_iUnA

10. JU$T (feat. Pharrell Williams & Zack de la Rocha) - Run The Jewels

It is amazing how smooth this track is because it dropped just as all the BLM and racial injustice issues started really gaining traction this last year like they wrote it the day it dropped. A song with a lyrical commentary on the unjust economic system in our county really hits home at the point in time that it was needed come out. Not only does this track have something to say, it also delivers its message in a slick way. El-P and Killer Mike breath fire, as they usually do, but the addition of Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine fame is really the cherry on top. The last time RTJ collaborated with Zack was for the amazing ‘Close Your Eyes (And Count to F**k)’, which was an amazing social commentary on the senseless violence between cops and minorities. This new track hits home just as hard.

https://youtu.be/32hUIGnMpOY

9. Must Stop (feat. Sarah Barthel of Phantogram)

Give me a duet between a male and female singer, lyrics about their lack of self-worth, and constantly being emotionally hurt and you’ve got a hit ballad. Alright, I’ve just broken down this track to its most basic elements and if you didn’t know I could have easily been talking about ‘Somebody I Used to Know’ by Goyte. Still, it’s an contagious track that has been stuck in my head since it dropped in October.

https://youtu.be/wNeyh_pfd8Q

8. Think About Things - Daði Freyr

This is the second Icelandic group to end up on my top song list this year and I blame social media for this one. This song was so catchy and the TikTok videos surrounding it made me laugh that it just ear-wormed its way into my head. The beat is so catchy and the background vocals are these heavenly voices that it’s hard not to tap your foot in beat with it. Also, one point of interest is the music video feels like it took the awkwardness right out of Napoleon Dynamite. That’s not a bad thing.

https://youtu.be/VFZNvj-HfBU

7. Save Your Tears - The Weeknd

I’m just gonna start by saying The Weeknd got freaking shafted at the Grammys this year. This is my favorite album he’s put out since I downloaded the ‘House of Balloons’ mix tape in 2011 and the best direction change for an artist in the last decade. The introduction of the 80’s synths and groovy basslines are so contagious that the internet roar from the lack of any acknowledgement from the academy was completely justified in my eyes. This track in particular features a shimmering melody as Abel bears his relationship failings. The opening bassline is more addictive than the cocaine Abel sung about on ‘Can’t Feel My Face’. It’s simply a well-made and beautiful piece of pop music. And if you ask why ‘Blinding Lights’ isn’t on my list it’s because it dropped as a single in 2019 and it’s already on that list.

https://youtu.be/XXYlFuWEuKI

6. Lost in Yesterday - Tame Impala

Some songs make my top lists for reasons that don’t necessarily have anything to do with how the song is constructed. While this track from Tame Impala is certainly catchy it makes it so far up my list for another reason. Kevin Parker echoes the nostalgia of old memories and how even the bad ones turn into good ones after enough time goes by. This track dragged up memories of driving 50+ miles in the wrong direction with my best friend as we made our way to Havasu. That was a shitty experience that turned into one of the fondest memories I have of a friend that’s no longer around to make more of those memories with. The song asks, “Does it help to get lost in yesterday” and I can answer this one very clearly. Yes, yes it does.

https://youtu.be/utCjuKDXQsE

5. At the Door - The Strokes

This is the most stripped back The Strokes have ever been. They tried something in this vain back with ‘Call Me Back’ on their album Angles, but not to this result. Typically, the vocals are layered behind a wall of guitars, bass, and distortion, but here Julian’s vocals are laid bare and it rightfully calls more attention to the emotions of the song. Emotions are what you really must hold onto in a Strokes song because like the previous entry, these lyrics are shrouded in metaphors. It certainly doesn’t take away from the track because the feeling of dread and being unable to escape comes across clearly as the heavy synths propel you forward. When the bridge finally comes in with its angelic vocals and 70’s induced sound waves it’s just a pleasure to listen to.

https://youtu.be/9CAz_vvsK9M

4. No Time to Die - Billie Eilish

Trying to follow singers Adele and Sam Smith can’t be an easy task, but especially following them in singing the opening number to the next Bond film. Thinking of singers that could fill those shoes I struggle to understand how the pop sensation Billie Eilish came to be the one producers turned to, but damn does it work. The melody is quintessential Bond. The horns, the background strings, and orchestral flourishes are all tried and true parts of a Bond song, but Eilish surprisingly works well in those confines and even reaches beyond her normal range in the backend of the track to show us she’s more than the whisper quiet singer we typically hear. There is still a lot here that is classic Eilish and it does change the normal Bond track from these high soaring ballads into something I’d say is more noir and moodier. I think the best description would be to call this a PB and chocolate accident. I didn’t think they’d go together, but they really do.

https://youtu.be/BboMpayJomw

3. Dragonball Durag - Thundercat

This song is like being soulfully harmonized by a R&B group in front of a fire, but the fire is coming from a dumpster. There is some amazing basslines coming out of this track and Thundercat marriages them perfectly to some truly funny lines that had me chuckling while I grooved along with the song. The vocal delivery is perfect and it brought back memories of my #2 song of 2016, Childish Gambino’s ‘Redbone’. I can certainly use more of these groovy tracks in my life.

https://youtu.be/ormQQG2UhtQ

2. Ode to the Mets - The Strokes

Like I said way back over there, The Strokes album could have filled my entire list, but this ending track takes the number 2 spot on this year’s list. The closing ballad goes through a roller coaster of melodic changes while keeping the tonal feeling of disappointment towards something or someone remains constant. Others have tried to decipher exactly what is being said and it’s always different. I think it’s up to the listener to determine and it’s different for everyone. We’ve all got someone or something we love, but continues to come up short. I think the best thing about this track is how it’s able to build a sense of urgency, but still end up in a quiet place but the end. Sort of like the ending of The Graduate. Yeah, this song is the end of The Graduate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://youtu.be/BjC0KUxiMhc

1. Run - Joji

There is a pitch perfect clarity to Joji that he never displayed before. Let’s be clear here, this is not a classically trained singer. This is a former crass YouTuber that has somehow belted out the most beautiful ballad this year for me. This really came out of the proverbial left field and actually shocked me. While previous works have relied on R&B and keyboard hooks, this track features an electric guitar that is woven through the track, but as the bridge comes the guitar flies into an amazing solo performance and builds and builds with a wail as Joji comes in for the finish with “I know you’ve not in love”. This is a dark morose track that fills the room with a vague sadness and the soaring guitar finish is just the high this low needs. I absolutely loved it.

https://youtu.be/P2YYk-oZFyI

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wannabe-cartoonist-blog · 7 years

Text

Reactions to Official SBM Recordings

A bit spoiler-y if you haven't seen the show or listened to the new recordings of the songs. So proceed with caution.

ACT 1

Intro/Bikini Bottom Day

-here we goooooo

-ahhhhh ze narrator

-love how they include sb's foghorn alarm, just gonna say that

-award goes to Ethan for the cutest yAWN

-ethan is using such a soft tone of voice and it's honestly perfect

-"meow"

-the shoe squeaks!!

-the laugh was a little weaker than other performances but I'll let it slide cause he's so cute

-I thought it was "where the sun shines down" not "when" but apparently not

-MY BOI PATRICK STAR

-"oOOO OOOO I want a verse!!!"

-I love the difference between his singing voice and the Patrick Voice (tm)

-the chorus harmonizing in the bg

-sQUIDY

-Gavin Lee sounds a little strange...like Squidward sounds like he could't care less about anything and is so resigned to his loud neighbors

-which...he is....but he sounds off idk. Still a good performance tho

-like with Pat, there's a distinction between his singing voice and speaking voice

-he sounds good though but not like the live performances....idk if that's good or bad

-the fart noise strikes again

-RIGHT INTO SANDY'S PART

-love the country track

-she sounds so nice 10/10

-that "daaaaAYYYYY" 10000/10

-they didn't include the explosion or like all of the dialogue that follows it but I like it. Keeps the flow of the song going

-KRABS

-THE WALKING NOISE

-plankton's voice is so deep and smooth, I love it

-KAREN'S "forever" WAS MADE TO SOUND COMPUTERIZED THAT WAS A REAL NICE TOUCH

-"CLeeeeeveeeeerr" melted butter

-I love krabs, Karen, and plankton singing together

-Squidward is so depressed 10/10

-pearls deep voice is 10000/10

-spongey sounds so sad after being shot down, perfection

-"everyone would say GOOD MORNING MR. SQUAREPANTS"

-the CHORUS!!!!!!

-I freaking love this song

-it captures the town so perfectly

-they finish the song without being interrupted by the volcano, very nice choice

No Control

-the panic

-Perch Perkins could punch me in the face and I would thank him

-velvet voice. Pure velvet.

-sandy, sponge, pat, sandy, THE BABIES

-all of krab's parts sounds much better than the live versions, not gonna lie

-smooth-voiced plankton once again. He and perch need a duet but I think I'd actually melt from it

-kAREN

-I love the bg singing, heck yeah

-"the end. Is. Coming!"

-spongey

-ETHAN'S "WOOOOOH" OMG I WASNT READY

-there are 3 ticks instead of 2, that's interesting

-David Bowie did a really good job with this. So sad he didn't get the hear the finished product.

-Thank you, David Bowie. Rest In Peace.

B.F.F.

-oh, boy I'm ready

-that cute acoustic sound oh yes

-classic Plain White Ts

-I love how they remember that spongebob wears glasses sometimes 1000/10

-their voices compliment each other so well wow

-I love pat's singing voice, did I mention?

-the best friend dance part kills me every time

-the instrumental bit 1000/10

-"feeling good" part literally knocked the breath out of me

-"you're my best friend forever!"

-"B.F.F that stands for"

"Spongebob and Patrick" <33333

When the Going Gets Tough

-"give me some muuuusic, Karen"

-KAREN IS PERFECTION

-"exCUSE ME?"

-"e-he-he"

-this sounds so freaking cool

-for the 700th time, I love plankton's voice

-the sponge rap!!!!

-"you've got one day left go home and pack"

-plankton changes his tone slightly near the middle/end and I almost had a heart attack cause it sounded so good

-they included the krabs and plankton interaction about the sleeves, good choice

-"I'm a one-celled organism...I don't even HAVE sleeeeVES."

-the MAYOR!!!!

(Just A) Simple Sponge

-I've listened to this about 100000 times already

-but I'll do this anyway

-again, Ethan always sounds so pure

-he really nails the innocence of sb

-the bg chorus is fantastic

-I love all the references in this song

-Brendan Urie did a great job

-I really love how this song is in reference to krabs' opinion of sb. That's always been a really cool relationship dynamic

-sb is like a son to krabs and krabs is kinda a father figure? (I know sb has a dad but) sb is always looking to krabs for approval and when he looses it he gets real down (the second movie has a cool nod to this; "you were like an underpaid son to me")

-all these artists could've just written songs that these characters could sing, but they all wrote songs that these characters would sing. They all really nail the characters and I’m so grateful for that.

-the last note is so damn powerful I love ethan slater

Daddy Knows Best

-this song always sounds good

-love how pearl made sure to always keep her voice deep

-"money, money" that's 100% pure Eugene Krabs

-LOVE THE CONTRAST BETWEEN PEARL'S SINGING AND SPEAKING VOICE

-opposite of Patrick's

-she sings so softly

-THE BEAUTIFUL SCREECHES OF "DADDY"

-I love Krabs

-the cries

-"DADDDDDDYYYYYYYYY"

"MONNNNNEYYYYYY"

Hero Is My Middle Name

-spongey, I love you

-this song is such a cute bop

-it's so 80s, thanks Cindy Lauper

-"yeahH"

-"mine's Jennifer" was included heck yeah

-the slide whistle sound

-WHEN THEY SING TOGETHER

-"alriiight!"

-the way sandy says "courage" and "myyyyyy middle name" I love

-"us go!"

-love the instruments at the end

-the bandstand-y type music for when Pat dances, SO GOOD

SuperStar Seastar Savior

-this is one of those songs I didn't really care for live

-but MY GOD ITS AMAZING AS A RECORDING

-LISTEN TO THOSE HARMONIES

-it really does sound gospel-y

-pATRICK

-he sounds so pure "my new friends"

-"does anybody bake?"

-GOD HE SOUNDS SO GOOD

-THE TWANG

-"ME"

-"uh, I dunno"

-"figARO"

-the wrestling announcer towards the end

-"y'all praise pink!"

-the explosion what a perfect way to end it

Tomorrow Is

-lili, slay me

-oO the shift!!!

-the sb and sandy harmony yes very good

-squidy still sounds a little strange but I love him

-krabs always on point

-"oooo"

-god, plankton's voice is velvet

-"victoryyyyy"

-spongey boy, god, he's so hurt by Pat im crying

-tHE CHORUS

-bikini bottom day reprise, I'm in actual tears

-gOD

ACT II

Poor Pirates

-another one I didn't care for live

-but the recording captures it so much better

-it just sounds so different

-the KAZOO

-"en-c-i-n-o"

-"h-winds in our earrings"

"don'tcha know pirates have feelings?"

-"p-o-o-rrrrrrr people too"

-bg guy who says "we've too many too gold teeth"

-I really really love this

-"the BLOOMIN ONION"

-Talk Like A Pirate Day is now a fully international holiday idc what anyone has to say

-god, the instrumentation is on point

-Sara Bareilles did an amazing job (listen to some of the songs from The Waitress if you like her stuff. She wrote for and stared in that too. "She Used To Be Mine" is amazing)

Bikini Bottom Boogie

-okay, this also sounds better than it was live

-that guitar, man

-really does sound like a good ol' rock ballad

-nice job, Aerosmith

-IM FEELING IT ALRIGHT

-"rad, gnarly, and tIGHT"

-"kiss my JELLYFISH"

-what a freakin bop

-yEAH

Chop To the Top

-the banjo oh yes yes yes

-I'm in love with it already

-tHE FIDDLE

-sandy is so pure

-"keep it moving don't stop till you drop" that's new I love it

-sPONGY YOU CAN DO IT

-"way" the TWANG HAS PASSED ON TO SB NOW

-F THIS IS THE REAL BOP

-pURE TOO PURE

-LILI, GOD YOURE KILLING ME

-ehem, yes this was fantasic.

-Great job, Lady Antebellum

(I Guess I) Miss You

-oh boi, here we go feels

-just imaging John Legend writing this while playing piano while Chrissy Teegan watches on in the bg is hilarious to me

-pat, my boy I'm in tears

-the "I"s in this song are good no matter how you're listening to it

-sponge is so HURT

-"nobody can make me laugh like you" :((((((

-the har-mon-iES

-IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-e-I'm in pain

-"bring my sunshine back again" the sad twang :,((((((((((((((((((

-nobody talk to me for a month I need to recover

I'm Not a Loser

-the piano, oh yes

-he's really doing the nasally thing

-it works tho

-he sounds much more put together and sure of himself than live, yet not, if that makes sense???? Gavin Lee gave it a different performance and I give him props

-the CRYING

-"huha?"

-*monotone* "this is weird"

-*just going with it* "okay"

-"look at me now mama!"

-okay, this is just my opinion but I think squidy just sounds better live???

-"I'm not a loooossar"

-the "stay at home" girl is always great

-"hey. Shhhhst."

Best Day Ever

-oh, we're here already omg

-pure sponge boy, pure

-I still get all choked up when the "best day ever" tune starts

-he sounds so SWEET

-sandy chiming in

-Pat joining heck yeah, yeah

-"dum, dum, dum, dum"

-really like how they changed "just tying my shoe" in the tv show version to "just being with you"

-I LOVE WHEN THE CHORUS COMES IN EVERY NOW AND THEN

-the Elvis impersonation is always great

-that bg girl after Squidward comes in? Amazing.

-"this is it, everyone" IM GONNA DIE

-this is so soft and so dark

-the soft countdown that gets more and more scared omg

Bikini Bottom Day Reprise

-the ukelele gets me every time

-it's the perfect instrument for sb

-"busy day" I'LL SAY

-I love everything about this

-Mr krabs?? I forgot he had a line in this?? Did he ever??? I LIKE IT

-the cymbals, play it pearl yes yes

-Pearl, you're killing it

-"a simple sponge can be handy when you're cleaning up spills" omg

-"sometimes you need a hero with some management skills" squidy that was such an amazing thing to say

-"hey there, that's me" it sure is, my son. It sure is.

-I LOVE BIKINI BOTTOM DAY JUST SO YOU KNOW

-the ending, the ENDING OMG

-"meow" I LOST IT

-the crazy instruments all at once, god it's great

-everyone in this town is a child

The SpongeBob SquarePants Theme/Closing

-*HEADBANGS*

-oMGGGGGGGGGGG

-THIS IS THE THEME REDUAL I NEEDED AND DIDNT EVEN KNOW IT

-THE GUITAR AT THE END

-well, I'm in tears and throwing all my money at this show

-and you should too

-also congrats if you made it this far with me on this incredible journey of pain, references, and fluffy feelings

#the spongebob musical #broadway #spongebob broadway #ethan slater #the spongebob musical soundtrack #wannabe writes

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