A Song Debut

The Fuzzy Carrot Nipples had a pair of shows August 31 and September 3, and we debuted a song Matt wrote called "Prenup". I'd like to discuss a little bit about how the song came into being.

Matt had played two versions of the song for his wife and sister, and they both said it wasn't funny. Matt was a little hurt, but he still believed in the song, and asked me to take a look at it. So I did.

I could see there were a couple of really good punchlines, but it didn't really feel like a hilarious song. We still liked the idea, and we wanted to try it out in front of a real crowd. But the reactions of Matt's family were daunting.

I tried coming up with more punchlines, but I seemingly had hit a wall. When I got to Colorado, we started discussing the song and what made it so attractive to him. We started brainstorming off each other. Eventually, we got to a question that stimulated lots of punchlines: What would be in the ideal man's prenuptial agreement?

Well, we came up with quite a few good ones. These were jokes. They wouldn't have benefitted from a rhyming scheme, they were just good, old-fashioned funny ideas. So we decided to try to introduce them by having a lawyer read actual text from the prenuptial agreement in the middle of the song. This idea of having stand-up comedy in the middle of a song is not new to us, as is evident in our song "If I Were The President", which is easily one of our best.

Long story short -- the audiences at both shows enjoyed the hell out of the new song. That's probably the best new song debut I've seen since we got on this crazy train with the radio appearance. That was what got us performing real, original comedy in front of actual audiences.

At any rate, there are a couple of takeaways from this experience. First, if Matt had gotten too discouraged by the initial response he got from his wife and sister, then this song easily could have wound up in a wastepaper basket. That would have been a tremendous loss, and yet, he had performed it twice and the audience didn't respond. According to the "try it three times, and toss it if it bombs twice" rule, that's exactly what he should have done. Yet, he broke the rule and a great song came out of it.

Second, I'm liking more and more the idea of putting actual stand-up into the middle of our songs. I don't want to say that we're going to always do that, but the biggest problem with musical comedy has got to be the punchlines-per-minute principle. Another is the fact you can't adjust your timing to the reactions of the audience. But putting spoken-word jokes in the middle of the song really seems to be working out well. I expect we'll be more likely now to do that in the future.

We're also more likely to do songs that are :30 to a minute long: songs like "Believe" or "Stinky Finger".

Anyway, I haven't had the kind of time to learn the new guitar workstation yet, but it's raining today, and I can't do yard work, so who knows? If I can only tear myself away from the abyss of online poker...