Adventure Thing #2.8 - "Summer of Heroes" & Overcool (Patreon)

Today's track could arguably said to have been a partial release, since some of you may have already heard it - but we never actually released it on any of our channels for a couple of reasons, so we decided to put it in the Unreleased category.

Unreleased Track - "The Summer of Heroes"

This track has a pretty serendipitous origin story - my best friend's ex was working at Crackle back in 2013, and reached out to me because she knew about IFD and thought it would be fun if we took a shot at writing a new song for their "Summer of Heroes" promotion on Roku that summer. It sounded like fun to me, and I ended up writing this song in pretty short order.

Crackle liked it, and they actually ended up dispatching a guy to shoot some footage of us playing the song and splice it together with action scenes from the movies that were going to be on Crackle. The YouTube video was deleted a while back, but I realized just now that someone reuploaded it last year! 

The other crazy thing about this recording is that we did it really quickly in the midst of working on the first version of The Near Future. That's right - this track was actually produced and mixed by the producer that we ended up not working with for the record, which is part of why I've always been self-conscious about releasing it. That said, I love the song and I'm thrilled to be releasing it as part of this project.

Semi-Released Tracks - "Overcool"

Up until we signed to Atlantic back in 2010, we had been giving away "Cool Is Just A Number" to anyone who signed up for our email list. Turns out the label didn't love that idea, and so they said we had to stop. (As a sidenote, other than our label time from 2010-2012 we have always given away our latest album for free for people who sign up for the email list). 

That said, it was always important to me that we give something of value to anyone who was willing to give us their email address, so we put together a 4 song collection we called "Overcool - Variations on Cool Is Just A Number" and started giving that away instead. 

I'll be honest, I hadn't listened to many of these tracks in a decade, so it was a lot of fun to revisit them:

• "Heads Up, Hearts Down (Acoustic)" - an acoustic version of one of the main tracks from Cool Is Just A Number, this is exactly what it sounds like. It's fun to hear a lot of the little chiptune parts that are a bit harder to hear in the full band version.
• "The Faster The Treadmill (Gameboy-Only Version)" - this was one of my first experiments into doing full arrangements of our songs on a single gameboy in real-time, strictly limited to 4 channels and whatever I could fit into them. As this was an early take on that, it's not super sophisticated chip programming, but still a lot of fun.
• "Money - Klopfenpop Mix" - this was a remix done by Klopfenpop which I still think is just stellar. His rap over the breakdown section in the bridge is just ridiculously good - and he even performed it live with us a couple of times, notably at the Portland stop on the 2012 War of Cyborg Liberation tour. Plus there's a Packy Lundholm feature on his latest album Haiku de Grace 
• "No One Likes Superman Anymore (Live at the Metro - July 2009)" - Ah the Metro in Chicago - what an amazing historic venue. Interestingly all of the chiptune you hear at the beginning was played by individual band members on various game controllers (including dancing on the Power Pad for the low notes). Also of note, I'm pretty sure this is one of the only shows (if not the only one) featuring Packy on guitar/vocals and Dave Midell on drums since Dave left and Chad joined in August 2009.