It all started (as so many things do) last Thursday with me being silly by myself. I was singing “Do Ya Wanna Taste It?“, a song by Wigwam which has become extremely popular as the theme to the great show, Peacemaker. I was singing it very properly with acute enunciation because it amused me. I then decided to make a TikTok of it.
Then as soon as I had posted this, I thought to myself, “Actually, this would make a really good dark, moody, stripped down ballad with an underlying sinister feeling to it,” and I immediately started working on that. Somewhere around 6 or 7 hours later, it was done. Or so I thought.
It was 2am and I was about to get in bed and start winding down by watching something on my iPad, when my brain suddenly screamed “WAIT! IT NEEDS EPIC STRINGS AT THE END!” and I knew my brain was totally right and it could not possibly wait. 2 hours later at about 4am, I had added all the strings and it was done. Or so I thought.
As inevitably happens, the next day I heard some things that needed fixing. Now, this always happens. I’m super impatient and once a song starts screaming to be let into this world, I scramble to make it happen as quickly as humanly possible. I post it everywhere and then as I listen hundreds of times over the next few days, I inevitably hear things that need fixing and then I have to go and replace all the files I’ve uploaded to Bandcamp, Reverbnation, etc. with the updated files. With those two places it’s fairly painless, but some others are not as easy such as my streaming distributor where I have to tell it to pull the file from all stores and then re-upload a new one. That is if it’s a single. If it’s an album, then the whole album would have to be pulled and re-uploaded. It’s a whole thing, and every time I decided to do this, I have to re-export the .wav and .mp3 files, put all the art and metadata back on them and redistribute them everywhere including transferring a file to my phone music library. And yet I don’t learn. Instead of going “Hey, I should probably just sit on this for a week until I’ve made all the inevitable changes that come along” I do the same thing I always do and POST IT EVERYWHERE IMMEDIATELY BECAUSE I CAN’T WAIT. And then the aforementioned annoying revision process.
So the next day, Friday I tightened up the strings and maybe a few other tweaks, and then I was done (are you detecting a pattern?). Or so I thought. I reposted the files everywhere and pulled the trigger on uploading it to my distributor.
Then late Friday night, I heard a few nitpicky things that I couldn’t decide if they were worth changing and doing the whole dance again. Plus, since it was a cover, I had to pay my distributor a $12/ year fee to procure the license for a cover song, and I wasn’t sure if that had gone through or not, so there was a chance a re-upload might cost me another $12. I sought the counsel of some friends and bandmates who thought it was fine and not worth the rigamarole.
Saturday I woke up and gave it a few more listens and decided it was going to bother me and that these last few tweaks needed doing. If it ended up costing me another $12, I’d just chalk that up to Impatience Tax. I definitely was glad I did them and finally felt like it was in a place where I could live with it. One more check with some bandmates, some more listens myself and now I felt it was really, really, definitely as done as these things get. I reuploaded everywhere including my distributor and felt pretty good about it.
Here it is on Bandcamp. I then decided that it would be fun to re-cut and time the Peacemaker opening credits to my song, so I did that too.
Now I really do truly think it’s done. Although there is this one line in the first chorus that kind of bugs me, but NO. NO. IT’S DONE.
Also just for fun, I released the strings only as I had so much fun composing that part, and in the mix you don’t get hear all the details quite as well.
So someone get James Gunn and John Cena to call me. They could use this in Season 2 at a dramatic point when everything has gone to hell for our heroes or something. It could be next seasons “Home Sweet Home.” Or maybe I can play a villain who has it in for Peacemaker and I’m playing this song! So many possibilities. Call me.