Don’t get me wrong: I had plenty of options going into this challenge for my mid-term period, in which I had to deliberately botch a popular song lyric. For example, I originally planned to do, “It doesn’t make a difference if we’re naked or not,” a mondegreen associated with Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” primarily so I could joke about divine providence coming back to haunt me for what I did to the band’s logo, in conjunction with Europe’s recent Geico ad, and maybe find a way to drag Jermaine Stewart into the mix, because it just felt right. However, given the upswing in news stories involving the abuse of the Second Amendment – to the point that there are now two reports of genital-related shootings in as many weeks, if you look hard enough – I had to go with one that fits the theme, and somehow manages to make it even darker. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the song I’ve opted to perform for you this week is none other than Pearl Jam’s ode to gun violence from 1991, “Jeremy.”

“Jeremy” was written in the wake of a high school shooting orchestrated by the aptly-named Jeremy Wade Delle, in Dallas, Texas – a city, and state, that apparently seems to value their hunting rifles, far more than the air they’re supposed to breathe, and the planet they’re supposed to live on. I mean, neglectful parents are one thing, but living in an environment where it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves, on top of that neglect, is a pretty scary concept for anyone to wrap their head around. Even their educational system glorifies survival of the sickest, and false lyrics like this aren’t going to help with matters any time soon.

For those of you who came in late, the line I botched was, “At home, drawing pictures with mounds of tots, with ham on top,” when the original lyric was, “At home, drawing pictures with mountaintops, with him on top.”

It actually took a while for me to edit both the original track, which I lifted from the music video using a website that specializes in MP3 conversion, and my voice, which I created a second file with using the Sound Recorder feature on my laptop, with the Audacity feature on my main computer. It was about as confusing as that last sentence.

Once I did, though, everything clicked into place, and my finished product was uploaded onto SoundCloud, for three-and-a-half stars, out of five for these two weeks.

Every weekend has a weekend? Well I guess it does Brad.. No the actual lyrics are every week has a weekend. For this 2.5 star assignment entitled Kiss the Guy you have to sing a song with the words as you thought they were. I thought Brad Paisley’s Crushin’ It said “Every weekend’s a weekend” It wasn’t until I was telling a friend how this line doesn’t make sense that I was told it’s “Every week has a weekend.” Glad I got that figured out before I saw him live.

In preparation for this assignment I reviewed a previous assignment called Confusion in Monkees in which the author thought the line was “and then I saw her face, now I’m going to leave her” instead of “and then I saw her face, now I’m a believer.” This was actually hilarious and I laughed out loud. While looking at this assignment I saw that the author of this blog only posted a little under 30 second of himself singing which made me feel more confident about this assignment.

I had wanted to do this assignment last time we did audio, but couldn’t think of a good example to use. I thought of Boss Ass Bitch by PTAF but I wouldn’t have felt confident or appropriate recording myself. My friend though the lyrics were ” I’m a possessed bitch” instead of “I’m a boss ass bitch” which is hilarious but I didn’t feel it was appropriate. Then while at the Brad Paisley concert two weekends ago I thought “Man I could have used this song” so I was excited when I got the opportunity to do another audio assignment.

In order to do the assignment I looked up a karaoke version of the song and played it off of my phone while I sang the lyrics and recorded it in Audacity.

After having completed the audio week this assignment was a lot simpler and faster. I knew that I couldn’t record while  playing the music off of my computer so I played it off of my phone and then when putting my assignment into Sound Cloud I knew that I had to export the Sound Cloud file so that I could upload it and then embed it into my blog post. This is what my recording looked like it Audacity.

x Kelsey

When listening to the Monkees as a kid I head a lyric that heavily confused me. They had a song named “I’m a Believer” and at one point I believe that they said “and then I saw her face, now I’m going to leave her.” This is heavily wrong because it says “and then I saw her face, now I’m a believer.” So for this post I present my misheard lyrics in song form, created with the help of a karaoke track and garage band.

This was a 2.5 star audio assignment for Ds106 named “Kiss This Guy”

This seemed a bit easy, so I wrote a whole parody for the first verse of smells like Teen Spirit.  I called the song “Welcome to Wades”, it’s from the point of view of the manager of Wade’s burgers on opening day.  I basically sing goofy things over the regular words to most songs, so this was a pretty quick and easy one.  I tried to think of a song that would be easily recognizable that I knew how to play, and what’s more recognizable than Nirvana?  I thought of the first line of the song “load up on guns,” and immediately changed the last word to buns, from there I started to look at what I could do with that, and instead of hoarding buns, I thought maybe we could be loading them into a toaster, and immediately burger place came to mind.  I used to work at a burger king, so I remember loading buns into a toaster.  Everything else just kind of fell into place after that.  I recorded the song on one track, in four takes.  The first one was pretty decent, but my voice was a bit pitchy, as I’m not warmed up.  I think my voice is still a bit pitchy in the last one, but taking half an hour to warm up defeats the point of a quick 20 minute assignment.  I hope the comedy makes up for the rough and tumble recording.  I have a home studio with an expensive Mic, and you’ll definitely hear that at some point, but for this I did it in my living room on my tablet’s Mic, and it sounds pretty decent, I must say.