I’ve always wanted to do the David Lee Roth audio remix assignment but never came up with a good use for it. Maybe I still haven’t, but I made this thing:

The other day I saw a tweet from Open Culture about The Isolated Vocal Tracks of the Talking Heads’ “Once In A Lifetime” and knew I had to do something with it. A Dave mashup seemed perfectly inappropriate. I spent some time looking for a gospel music background for it, without luck. Then, as if by fate, magic or coincidence, this Donnie Hathaway track showed up on Youtube, giving me the pieces I needed. I grabbed the tracks and imported them in Audacity, and started fooling around with the placement. The Talking Heads verses seemed to fit well rhythmically with the Hathaway music. I chopped up the Roth vocalizations and distributed them as accents. His lyrics didn’t fit so well, so I left them out, as well as the “Once in a Lifetime” chorus. Roth is still kind of jarring, but Hathaway makes it work as well as it does.

I figured if I put it on Soundcloud it would get blocked, but Youtube might let it through with a copyright claim or three. So I needed some visuals. I tried using the actual Talking Heads video. I didn’t think I could get the “Running with the Devil” video to work with it so I found a Roth GIF to throw in whenever he showed up in the track. That wasn’t working and I almost gave up, but then I thought of just repeating a GIF. I’d seen it before and liked the effect. The visual component is just stupid in this case, and probably would have been better if I just used the Byrne GIF. But at least I made a thing…