The Process #10 — Cartoon Movies

Posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 // 0 Responses.

Name: Cartoon Movies
Date Written: 5/2/09
Date Recorded: 5/8/09
Written for: Carbon Footprint

What better way to celebrate 10 weeks of The Process than with a song you probably already know? I know, this always happens… The Process used to be cool but then they changed it up and it was never the same. Another band that couldn’t just stick to what worked for them. Sister City is dead to me.

We’ll be back with your regularly scheduled b-side next week, but for this anniversary of sorts, I wanted to talk about what it takes to take a song from acoustic demo to album-ready. “Cartoon Movies” is a great example of a song that became what it did due to the arrangement. If you need a reference, it’s streaming to your right (this may not be true in the future).

The acoustic version is fine, if a little bit static. The fourth verse switches up the strumming pattern, but for the most part the song is just lightly-strummed 8th notes ad infinitum. There are four verses and three choruses, all of which sound more or less the same.

When we decided to work on the song, Daniel and I knew that we’d need to do something to differentiate the verses from each other, especially since each one starts with the same lyrics. Through the first chorus we wanted to keep it a fairly straight ahead rock song, but change up the instrumentation a little bit. (Acoustic first verse, then electric second verse)

The third verse ends with a pseudo-breakdown that started as a joke (“let my people go”). Notable other parts of songs that started as jokes include the first distorted verse in “Going to Pinneberg” and the two-beat pause before the second verse of “Poland, 1845). Am I losing you?

We cut a chorus for the sake of maintaining the momentum coming out of the breakdown, decided to calm it down a bit during the fourth verse, and then returned triumphantly to the final chorus, just like a real song that people like!

In the studio, we solidified the arrangement and added the electric guitar riff at the beginning of the song. There is also a brutal tapping electric guitar part that sits in the session file, muted. It is better for everyone that way. I also rewrote the more cringe-worthy lyrics in the song and decided to sing “route” as “rowte,” not “root.”

That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Lyrics:

Living breathing human beings
Are crowding my periphery
In glorious passivity
I am surrounded
All of them have names and faces
Loving friends and close relations
Secrets kept in sordid places
Don’t you tell a soul

Living breathing human beings
Are sucking all my energy
With coughing fits a eulogy
Will be in order
With blame alive like crooked teeth
The gaps aflame with subtlety
And men on trial for sodomy
We’re moving backwards

Oh the kitchen sink
Will bring together everything
Oh the bathroom floor
Who could ask for more?

Living breathing human beings
Are walking, running, scurrying
On paper routes and studying
We’re so much smarter
Saddling our shoulder blades with
Useless facts and information
Building our own brand new nation
Let my people go

Oh the kitchen sink
Will bring together everything
Oh the bathroom floor
Who could ask for more?

Living breathing human beings
Are passed out in pools of anything
Drowned in words and cycling
Through cartoon movies
I remember everything
That anybody says to me
So I burn CDs to give for free

Oh the kitchen sink
Will bring together everything
Oh the bathroom floor
I wouldn’t dream of asking for anything more