Liner Notes For Nobody

Many of you have asked. Not many. Maybe two. Actually, no one.

Still, some of you might be wondering how these wonderful videos have come into existence. This is that post.

The pattern is the same every time. There is a blog post from fifteen-odd years ago. There is a song written now, which takes the post and locates the cheesiest angle available in it. Then there is a video, which takes the song somewhere the post never asked to go.

So, three things per song. What the post was about, what the song did to it, and what the video did to the song. One of them stopped at two, and I will explain that when we get to it.

Will You Be My Lily, While I Am Your Silly

Escaped from Big Banger with his poems and other art forms, 2011.

The post was a junk drawer. An evening walk in which I imagined myself freshly released after twenty years of wrongful imprisonment, a girl passing by, and the realisation that every atom in her hair and every atom in my boots had once been packed into the same cubic inch of heat before the Big Bang. Then a public notice for aliens clarifying that shooting pigeons is banned in this region but ducks are fair game. Then four lines, filed under “A Love Song”:

I got no mistress
That’s causing distress.
Would you be my lily
And I’ll be your silly.

This became the first song purely because the lines already existed. Suno filled in the rest of the lyrics. I would like to report that I supervised this closely. What actually happened is that a machine took a four-line joke and handed back something sincere and deeply cheesy, and I liked it, and that one decision has quietly set the tone for everything since. The foundation of the cheesiness was poured here.

For the video I wanted geniuses at work, getting distracted, being loved on. I asked the AI to suggest a few more and the suggestions were the obvious ones, so in the end I picked them myself. Newton, Turing, Tesla, Van Gogh, Freud analysing a teddy bear. Two were the most fun to animate: teddies and flowers sliding down the Gaussian curve while Gauss watches, and Archimedes in the bath, discovering buoyancy and a rubber duck in the same instant.

I Choose You

Escaped from It Really Doesn’t Matter, 2014.

The original post was about not being able to order. Fancy place, fancy names, menu card in hand, and no opinion arriving. The post gives the real reasons, which are less charming than the problem. I genuinely do not know which dish will bring me more joy, and announcing one anyway would imply a considered preference I do not hold, which is an implicit lie. Handing the decision to you is freeloading on your decision-making. It ends with a formula for saying all of this out loud, and a proposal that menus should skip the dishes and simply ask how hungry you are, on a scale running from “as hungry as a rat” to “so hungry that I can even eat a rat right now.”

The song ignores every word of that and takes the cheesy angle, which had been sitting there the whole time. I cannot choose anything on this menu. I choose you.

The video pushes it one step further. Looking into the menu while thinking about the person sitting across from you starts revealing who the diners actually are. A 1950s cabaret restaurant, candlelight, a band on the stage, and at every table a couple whose menu quietly gives them away. The reporter opens hers and finds the man in glasses instead of the one in the cape. Bruce and Selina. Bob and Helen over sushi. Wanda and Vision with parmesan and champagne. Joker and Harley with risotto and white wine. Homelander ordering milk.

Chai Tea at Three Thirty

Escaped from Infinity and beyond, 2011.

Coffee costing as much as a 750 ml bottle of beer was, in 2002, a genuine shock. We had been paying one or two rupees for a cup of tea. Forty-five rupees at Barista in Delhi took some getting used to, and eventually I got used to it. Then I moved to Bangalore and found Infinitea on Cunningham Road, where the tea was a hundred rupees, milk had to be specifically requested, and the cookies were fifty. That one shook me to the core.

The post worked out that the name was accurate. Take the ratio of what you pay to what you get. Let the numerator grow disproportionately large while the denominator stays small, because it is only tea, and the ratio tends to infinity. Beat that and you have gone beyond. They were announcing it on their own signboard, unwittingly, at the top of their voice.

Tea is not supposed to be a transaction here. It sits somewhere next to water. It is the birthright of every visitor and the moral responsibility of every host. I still remember a house in my paternal village where the lady sent her five-year-old out the back door for milk, and he came back in through the front announcing loudly that there had been none at his uncle’s, so he had got it from Sham’s. She went red. We got a very sweet tea, the fifth of the day.

Beer and coffee have both kept pace with inflation since, and the arithmetic no longer surprises anybody. The shock never left. It sits exactly where it landed, a small void that has not filled in twenty-four years, and I had to put this one down.

There is no video for this one, and that is a decision rather than an omission. I had ideas. I did not like any of them. The lyrics were written mostly as a test, to hear what Hindi words and a Hindi voice would come out sounding like, and the quality genuinely surprised me. The video is a different problem. Until I have more control over what the machine does with a picture, this one stays a song.

Promise You Won’t Chew My Red Rose Again

Escaped from My Jazz Album, 2012.

The post was a jazz album that did not exist. Thirteen tracks, each with a completely straight-faced liner note, written after listening to Smooth Jazz on 91.9 FM and failing to find the connection between the titles and the instrumentals. Track four: “Promise You Won’t Chew My Red Rose Again. A haunting melody of repeated attempts at unrequited love. Set to be a critics’ favourite.”

The idea came from Florentino, who ate the rose petals every time he read a letter from Fermina in Love in the Time of Cholera. Fifty-one years, nine months and four days of waiting, and flowers for dinner throughout. The song does not attempt any of that. It is a much simpler variation on unrequited love, which is the only kind I can set to music without embarrassment.

The video goes somewhere more abstract. The audience is the one who is going to chew the object of affection. The rose is what is left over afterwards.

They Don’t Make Soaps Like They Used To

Escaped from Tooth-Fairies And Soap, 2011.

The post opens with a bad haircut from a novice barber and ends up somewhere else entirely. On the way it admits that this blog is self-exhibition, that a good number of the apologetic scenarios described here never happened, and that the lies told on it are ornamental rather than dishonest. Then it argues that ordinary things deserve more wonder than they are given. Soap is made of subatomic particles. Soap can be traced back to the Big Bang. Soap, as we know it, will cease to exist before long. And then, in a parenthesis, because the post could not help itself: a soap can be eaten too, and it is delicious.

That parenthesis is the whole song. It is for the nostalgia, and it is for all the soap eaters out there, who know exactly who they are and have known since about the age of four. The lyrics are nostalgia almost end to end, which is the one subject that needs no cheesy angle applied to it, because it arrives cheesy.

The video brings it back the direct way, through the advertising. Lifebuoy. OK. Godrej. The 1980 Liril. Then the montage widens out past soap entirely into Campa Cola, Dalda, Surf, refrigerators, radios, scooters, telephones and trains. It is not a documentary about soap. It is a small lament for a time when ordinary products had jingles, typography, and unnecessarily strong opinions.

In Closing

Five posts, written between 2008 and 2011 by a man who had no idea any of this was coming for him. Five songs written now, by the same man, with considerably more help. Four videos made by asking a machine for pictures and then disagreeing with it, and one song still waiting for the tools to catch up.

Nobody asked. I have answered anyway.