Beatnik Turtle's Encore Song Of The Day

This song is a Beatnik Turtle live favorite. While it's a decent studio song, it's a twisting song that just has the best energy live. You can hear what it sounds like from the stage on the Beatnik Turtle live CD, which will be released in 2007. Her Imaginary Closet is inspired by an article about women's shopping habits. According to the article, women try on an astounding number of clothes without buying them. Men, on the other hand, often buy more than they try on.

Randy Chertkow wrote this one in late 2005 as Alan Greenspan was kicking off the housing boom by lowering interest rates repeatedly. Randy was positive that such a boom would one day end and, having spent years always wanting to write a song about financial trends and Greenspan in particular, finally had his chance. Randy's now working on a song about Bernanke.

Dugan O'Keene came in with this fun one based on some lyrics Matt had. Sometimes it's a challenge to write a melody to a structured set of lyrics, but not for Dugan. "What A Horrible Thing To Say" also has the distinction of being the first song of the day to be tagged for having "explicit lyrics" thanks to one sh*tty little word.

The concept for this song came when Matt Scholtka came up with the lyric "I'm not your type I'm not inflatable." He also had the "no night stand" idea as well. From there, Jason and Carrie Bruno (who's singing) blew it up into this would-be dance club hit.

This instrumental has flavors of Cabaret Voltaire.

Sometimes, sh*t happens. You know, snakes on a plane. And other times, your troubles are self-inflicted.

Ted Blegen showed up at the studio one session with a shiny new mandolin and only three chords. Of course, we had to write a song about it.

There was no keyboard available when this song was recorded, so all of the synth parts on this song were painstakingly hand-crafted and entered in by hand. The consensus was: playing keyboard parts using a keyboard is easier and more efficient.

Our friend was horrified when he found out that we took his joke voice mail from years ago and turned it into a song.

At Jason's workplace, there was an office that no one ever went into. His first thought was, "I wonder what the hell goes on in there." His next thought was, "Hey - that's a song!" To this day no one, but no one, knows what goes on in that office.

To his shame, about a month before this song was written in early 2006, Randy had no idea what the term Going Commando meant. The only way for him to repay his karmic debt was to write a song about it. Tom's inspired fingerpicking weaved it into a delicate threnody about freedom from wearing underwear.

This is an instrumental written quite some time ago, created by Jason.

This song was written for a sketch comedy show at Second City called "Sci-Fry" directed by Matt Scholtka. It was performed during a sketch called "Dr. Insidious Torture." In the sketch, Dr. Insidious Torture had captured our hero, the aptly-named, Captain Hero. Given the premise, we wrote an over-the-top theme for him drawing on our memories of sugar cereals and early Saturday mornings in front of the TV.

This song was specifically written as a tribute to BoardGameGeek's board gaming podcast, "GeekSpeak," when it was decided that the show was ending. The show aired for a year and a half and was hosted by Scott Alden (Aldie) and Derk Solko (Derk) of www.boardgamegeek.com. It was not only the first gaming podcast, it was also among the first podcasts ever, and had thousands of avid listeners. Beatnik Turtle's involvement with the show came after the first few episodes when the band, which was a fan of the show, wrote in and offered to write and record a theme song for it.

Ironically, "Face Down In The Snow" was written on an extremely snowy weekend. Wait, that would be unironically, wouldn't it? Oh well, the point is it was quite a blizzard, with traffic accidents, and power outages all over the area. We had luckily made it up to the cabin in Wisconsin for a big recording weekend before it hit. But shortly after arriving and settling in, we suddenly realized that Steve Owens, our keyboard player and John Owens' brother, was nowhere to be found. He was there...then he wasn't. Weird. John's reaction was: "Jeez, I hope he's not face down in the snow somewhere." We all looked at each other, and said, "That's a song!" Rather than head out in the blizzard to find him, we headed back downstairs to write the song. It's a song that couldn't have been written with Steve. Luckily, we didn't have to play it at any memorial for him or anything: Steve made it safely back home through the blizzard in one piece.

Years ago, Jason got trapped in his room many, many years ago during some big party his mom threw. Luckily, he was trapped with his Casiotone and a four-track. Having nothing better to do, he wrote this song. The old lady crowd noises at the beginning and end of the song are all real and were recording at the time thanks to Jason's spy training and his cunning ability to slip the microphone out the door unnoticed. Contrary to public opinion, no old ladies were harmed in the making of this song.

In 2006, Beatnik Turtle was not only working on The Song Of The Day, Randy and Jason were also working on the Indie Band Survival Guide., which got some tremendous press from Billboard Magazine, Reuters, the Associated Press, and the blogosphere. During the time of writing it, all Tom Roper heard, week after week, was "it's almost nearly done!" since Randy and Jason kept writing, editing, researching, re-writing, re-editing and re-researching it. All this instead of recording music which was all Tom was hoping to do. So, he wrote a song about it.

About two years ago, Beatnik Turtle got an email from a band out of the UK that wanted the chords to a song we wrote called "I Think You Think I Think You Don't Like Me." They wanted to add the song to their setlist. We gave them the chords, but in return, we asked for a song that they wrote. After all, it's only fair that if they were covering one of of ours, we should do something with one of theirs. What we got back was what became the first verse of this song. It was about one of the band members, Chappy, and how he had the flu. Jason ended up turning the 20 second email idea they had into a full song and this is the result: a song created via a "US-UK Music Exchange Program." This is also the first Beatnik Turtle song to feature Tom Roper on guitar. He had just joined the band at that point.

Written as a theme song to a road trip. A road trip that when all was said or done, was shaped like a trapezoid.

This song came about when Jason and a friend misheard the lyrics in Belle and Sebastian's song "Me and The Major." ("Me and the Major don't see eye to eye") and thought the misheard lyric would make a great lyric.