I have always had a hard time writing lyrics. I find personal lyrics to be grating though I enjoy well written personal words, though this is usually rare. By choosing film directors as my subject it liberated me from self-examination save what I discovered writing songs about film directors. The title “The Great Directors” is meant to sound pretentious, in case you were wondering. I enjoyed the absurdity of proclaiming this album as something Great and then having it be driven by a monophonic consumer grade Casio from the early 1980s.
I came up with the album grappling with how to finish an album since I had not finished one in years, though there are many songs written waiting to be re-recorded. It got tiresome not having anything concrete to show for it so I conceived this project with extremely limited instrumentation and relatively quick turnaround just to get past the hump of getting my first record in a long time out.
The lyrical content ends up reflecting this in the end, though I only notice this now that it is finished. Even with the distance afforded writing about something that is not very personal I still spent a long period of time on most of these lyrics. The rest I came up with the night before this album was released in a marathon recording session. The Lucas lyrics were made up while I was making up the melody as I had only come up with the backing track (which in turn was recorded earlier that day because I was not happy with the earlier George Lucas song I recorded). I own and act on “quality”!
As for my absurd amount of knowledge, this stems from my job working in a movie theatre in the projection booth for the past few years. One of the only websites accessible from work is the iMDb. I probably read most of the trivia on that site back when my responsibility was more limited, idle time which I no longer have (so my bosses know I work hard for you, I no longer slack, I have learned the errors of my ways). Instead, I read any article I could find the past two months while writing these songs and most of them were on the Internet, so I would not treat anything written here on this site as fact just to be safe. This is all my personal opinion and speaks for nobody else, certainly these directors. There is your general disclaimer.
Of course this is all hindsight. In actuality I chose the title and subject completely arbitrarily just so I could get an album done. I then worked on it as hard as I could in the time period I allotted myself (shortened by panicked procrastination). It mostly came out better than I expected.
I hope you enjoy it. I certainly had fun making it. Anytime I can take a thing that filled my childhood with horror (KALI MA, SHAKTI DE) and turn it into a catchy chorus is a good time for me and hopefully you too.
The album cover for "The Great Directors". I had cultivated the portraits of the directors some time ago. Originally the Poodleface was supposed to be much smaller with the title "The Great Directors" somewhere at the top. In a fit of last minute insanity I blew the Poodleface up to massive size.
It is somewhat more fitting this way. The looming Poodleface encroaching on the lives of these film directors. It certainly fills me with insane glee. |
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The Poodleface moniker in conjunction with the videos I put together in the summer of 2006 came to represent a collision of popular culture and absurdity. This perfectly encapsulated "The Great Directors", hence its use.
More than one person has told me this is confusing. Their dissent has been noted in my logs.
ERF
Any more questions? Tell me! E-mail: poodleface (at) livejournal (dot) com
: The Great Directors: About The Great Directors 
