“There’s no sense crying over every mistake / You just keep on trying til you run out of cake”
It’s been a crazy 2 years. Actually it’s been a crazy 5 years. But while I arranged still alive, I began to think how am I still alive in this? How am I able to make this work? The insane 18 hour days – marketing, transcribing, orchestrating, research, blogging, networking, traveling, etc.
And so I thought it would be quite fitting to arrange this 2007 Portal Videgame piece by Jonathan Coulton, since he’s what got me involved in this whole derivative thing to begin with back in 2006. It feels like only yesterday when I arranged ‘Code Monkey’ and ‘Ikea’, and I’ve grown a lot since then.
The cake in the lyrics suggest that it’s “the prize”. But I began thinking that that’s not entirely true though, because the cake is not the prize. I feel achievements aren’t given as ‘a piece of cake’, it’s more accurate to think of achievements as ‘crumbs’, and little crumbs eventually then build up to a large cake.
It brings me back to when I read “How I Did It”, which taught me that you can’t give up after week 5, or week 50. Because the reality is things take time, and if you give up on week 40, who is to say that week 41 wouldn’t have been the news article you’ve been craving, or the radio spin you needed. For me, the little crumbs add up. When your traffic rises from an featured story, the traffic eventually dies, but it’s always higher than where it was earlier. It takes a while to hone your skills of an arranger, build an audience, create good work, get press, and prove you’re not going away. The reason why 90% of ideas or bands fail are because they give up. But it’s not about week 5, it’s about week 500.
I love everything about the passive-aggressive nature of these lyrics, and the imagery it creates. One image that stands out in my mind is when bitreaper created Thinking With Portals during Something Awful’s Portal Contest. Portal and Jonathan Coulton perfectly assist and complement each other, and this game just screams creativity, fun, and problemsolving. Valve created one of the coolest games in recent memory.
I wanted to capture GLaDOS soft, honest, yet almost tearful voice with the flutes. The most recognizable section was the arpeggio riff in the original song, which I felt was the perfect place to have the violins pizzicato in order to introduce the chords. This allowed me to leave it room to grow, and so I made sure to play it throughout, but not too often as to sound tiring to the ear when switching between instruments. The powerful bass line was of course a perfect fit for the cello and basses, which I punctuated with the brass at times to build tension, and have the vibraphone slur the melody to create a fun, yet light, tone.
I hope I captured the essence of this piece because it means a lot to me. Still Alive, to me, is about overcoming obstacles, keeping our chins up, and coming back stronger than before. I’ve learned that the cake is not a lie – in fact, it couldn’t be more truthful or real. It all starts with a crumb, a small achievement, one fan, one believer, and a simple idea. We should always fight for our goals because the real prize is not the cake, it’s having the guts to even try something new in the first place. The crumb is a triumph, and I’m making a note here that wherever there are crumbs, there is already a huge success.
Hat Tip: Thanks to Sean, Matt, Jon, TJ, and my FB community for this week’s suggestion!
Our iTunes Page
Songs We’ve Arranged
Buy Me A Pizza
Become A Fan
