Adventure Thing #2.18 - "Happiness Is Someone To Blame" & Nikki Lynette Collaborations (Patreon)

A fun note - all of the Preorders for the Cool Is Just A Number / Welcome To The Breakdown Vinyl LP shipped out last week, so if you ordered one it should be arriving soon! But now for today's main event:

Unreleased Track - "Happiness Is Someone To Blame"

Similar to "Give The Kid A Chance", this song came out of a collaboration with a couple of professional songwriters in LA during a writing trip I took while writing songs for KABOOM! It was actually one of my first cowrites and I was still figuring out how that whole process worked, but I think we turned out a pretty fun song. The two cowriters on this are no slouches: Ryan Peterson and Nolan Sipe were just getting started at the time but they've both had pretty epic songwriting careers since then.  Also, this was actually the first time I had attempted a Gameboy "solo", something that eventually found its way into other tracks like "Move". 

Semi-Released Tracks - Nikki Lynette Collaborations

I first met Nikki while doing a WGN interview in Chicago downtown, since we were both bloggers for the platform ChicagoNow which was an early initiative of the Chicago Tribune to explore the scary new "digital" world. We hit it off and stayed in touch, and over the years she made a few pretty stellar collaboration tracks with us - I say "collaboration track" because they're clearly so much more than remixes, listening back to these I still think they're all just so cool. 

• "72 Virgins (No One Likes Superman Anymore remix) - I believe this was the first collaboration, which came out on Nikki's "Roses & Guns" Mixtape . It's actually a bit funny since it's a remix of a remix, using Bill's "Robodragon Remix" as the baseline for her version. It's pretty heavy lyrically, and I love the Bill Maher samples too. 
• "Young & Dumb" (No Kontrol remix) - This one and the next were on Nikki's "Roses & Guns 2" Mixtape. I really love this one, especially the counterpoint vocals she adds to the chorus
• "And Your Bird Can Sing" - Not only is this a super fun remix of our "And Your Bird Can Sing" cover, it actually has a "trick" opening section where she turns expectations on their head.  
• "cRaZie$" - When we finally released KABOOM! we asked Nikki to do another remix, having loved everything she has done before, and this is no exception.