Adventure Thing #2.6 - "When I Grow Up I'm Gonna Be A Rockstar" & Email List Tracks part 1 (Patreon)

Greetings and salutations! This week's unreleased track is a funny one with a bit of history behind it, but in much more of a lighthearted way than other tracks:

Unreleased Track - "When I Grow Up I'm Gonna Be A Rockstar"

Back in the late summer of 2011, we got a very random opportunity: did we want to be the "Super Music Friends" for a day or two of the Yo Gabba Gabba Live! tour? Super Music Friends are a very hilarious and specific part of the live show: you wait backstage on a very small (like 4" x 16") platform, and then they wheel you out to play a song (we played Geeks) and then they wheel you back. 

Somehow our manager JJ got the label to pay for it (since these slots are unpaid), and we embarked on what ended up being a week of these dates across the midwest. They were hilarious times and we had a blast, including that one time we sang the Goodbye song in 4-part harmony with Bootsy Collins . 

But we also spent a TON of time hanging out backstage listening to Yo Gabba Gabba music on the monitors, since we only played for like three and half minutes a day. So, I decided to write a Yo Gabba Gabba song while I was waiting around. It's pretty silly and never actually went anywhere, but I thought it would be a fun one to share for this project. It also is the only time my wife Lizzie ever appears on any IFD recording, doing her best Foofa impression.

Semi-Released Tracks - Email List Part 1

There will likely be 2 or 3 of these posts, with tracks from the IFD Email List back in 2009-2010 that didn't really fit into any other category. This was a really fun period since making these songs was a lot of what helped us play around and explore new and different sounds in ways that we probably wouldn't have on an official record. Plus, a lot of them are covers, which gave us a great excuse to explore things sonically without having to actually write a song first.

• "Why Bother" - Weezer is obviously a huge inspiration for the band as a whole and for me personally, and back in early 2009 we got asked if we wanted to participate in Pterodactyl Squad's 8-bit Weezer album. Pinkerton is one of my all time favorite albums and this track is one of my favorite on it, so this was a no-brainer choice for us to have fun with. We did some serious experimentation with this one, even weaving in some orchestral pieces like french horn (this was around the time of Overture 1.0 as well). 
• "Rickroll + Mario" - This is actually a live recording from the Cool Is Just A Number EP Release Show back in February 2009. I thought it would be super fun to "live Rickroll" people, and then we threw in some Mario to spice it up. This was a staple of our early shows, especially since we only had 5 original songs to play!
• "And Your Bird Can Sing" - I have always loved this Beatles song, as it was my first exposure to the idea of "guitarmony" - harmonized guitar melody lines. Back when Packy first joined the band, someone mentioned we should do a Beatles cover, and for some reason this one came to mind and we had a lot of fun putting it together.
• "The Future Soon" - Jonathan Coulton is a master songwriter, and it's no secret that I am a huge fan. This has always been one of my favorite songs of his, and back in 2009 we took a stab at covering this song. My one regret is that the one time we opened for JoCo in 2012,  we didn't prepare the song since it felt weird to play one of his songs at his own concert, but then he asked us to play it! We didn't have the chiptune prepped so we didn't end up doing it. Total missed opportunity!