Make with the Play play, pretty please.
It’s been a month of moving. In the past three weeks, I’ve helped four people move, one of which was an emergency move where a group of valiant friends came together to help an old roommate of mine, a complete stranger to them, move away from a bad situation. I can’t forget the look on her face when our van pulled up, and then another, and then another, and cars kept rolling in.
Protip, moving is how you find out who your real friends are. Nobody wants to do it. It’s a pain, it can put a ton of strain on your body, and exposes you to everyone’s organizational anxiety. Nobody wants to ask their friends to help, for those same reasons. But you need to. It’s often too large a task to be done on your own, not to mention the time and financial pressures that are always involved in moving, and that’s before even thinking about moving between cities. Unless you’re some kind of master blackmailer, the people who turn up on moving day are the kinds of people who are bound to you through unspoken loyalties. Gryffindors are too busy being heroes to help you, but Hufflepuffs not only show up, they bring pie.
The day after helping three people move, as I messed about with chords and glanced around Kayleigh’s new bungalow, and those words just fell out. A silly song. A cute song, about the simple, stupid, most important thing about being friends. Trying to be there when they need you, even when you don’t want to be, but because they are in need. To do that for friends is noble. To do it for strangers is incredible.
Philosophy aside, we recorded the vocals on a Shure SM58, through an M-Audio Fast Track, and edited it together in Audacity. It was maybe the fifth time we’d played it all the way through, so in addition to a lot more practice, we’re going to tune up the vocals and the harmonies as we get used to how the song sounds. The lyrics came down in half an hour, but it’ll take a few weeks of playing it to really figure out how they need to sound and to make adjustments. Writing the song can be the easy part, but there’s a long way to go between written and finished. Miles to go before we sleep and all that.
