It's Jay!

November 14, 2008 9:01 AM

A less-than-one-minute theme song I wrote five years ago for a fictional sitcom about a guy I worked with at the time. A music challenge twofer that I have had in the can for half a decade.

It was only waiting for this moment to arrive. Outta my head, flapjax.

See also the alternate 80's sitcom parody track, Without Jay. Also short. Also fictional show. A two-by-twofer.

I wrote this up after having had a series of jokey conversations with the Jay in question about how he should quit his job as a call center supervisor and put his English degree to real use, by writing a meta-sitcom starring himself as a trope. I enjoyed the hell out of these conversations—the guy was whipsmart and funny and one of my favorite people in the office.

I liked the running idea so much that I sat down and recorded these two songs one afternoon after work, burnt a CD, and then spent the next morning at work doing some illicit pen-and-watercolor painting of a cover for the CD, based on his company portrait. Which I thought was, you know, hilarious.

I had a lot of time on my hands at that job—specifically on my hands, since I had a phone headset and spent much of the day listening (in thirty or forty second increments) to a phone autodialing and ringing and not getting picked up by a human—and I was pretty ruthlessly dedicated to doing creative projects with my idle fingers. The wall was covered with tiny portraits I'd drawn; I carved a couple sets of of alphabet stamps at 1/4" and 3/4" scale from filched pencil erasers and Pink Pearls, respectively; I wrote a lousy novel one November. So doing something like knocking off a clumsy ad hoc portrait of someone was just a morning diversion for me.

Which is all well and good, but the flip side of the coin was Jay suddenly receiving, out of the blue, a hand-painted portrait of himself from some weird and excitable guy he works with for a CD with songs about (in a sense) Jay.

Eventually he acknowledged that this did, in fact, kinda creep him out. Sorry, Jay!

posted by cortex (10 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

It was only waiting for this moment to arrive.

Haha! Fly you crazy blackbird! And speaking of the Fab Four, weren't these two fictional TV shows just ripoffs of Harrison's Within Jay and Without Jay?

Love your la-la-las.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:54 PM on November 14, 2008


I like to imagine that the la-la-las are being sung by chipper Swedish lumberjacks who are swinging their arms, elbows acrook, in time with the beat.
posted by cortex at 7:58 PM on November 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


This track is totally Jhey. luh, luh-le-luh-luh-luh.... And it made me smile. Dammit.
posted by not_on_display at 8:49 PM on November 14, 2008


See, these are the things I do at work too. Why does no one ever appreciate their theme song?
posted by buriednexttoyou at 4:16 PM on November 15, 2008


My playlist name finally makes sense to everyone else. I do love this, though. Nice one.
posted by sleepy pete at 4:37 PM on November 15, 2008


Funny.
Sounds like you recorded the vocals through a drive-thru microphone. Or a pair of thick pantyhose.
posted by chococat at 11:13 PM on November 15, 2008


Oh, it also puts me in the mind of "Call Mr. Plow, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Plow."
In a fancy, happy way.
posted by chococat at 11:15 PM on November 15, 2008


You could make bank creating ditties and jingles. Serious. Maybe you already have.
posted by ORthey at 10:01 AM on November 17, 2008


Ha, that's fantastic cortex.
posted by holloway at 8:40 PM on November 17, 2008


All the t.v. themes hit the bullseye. Jay's cubicle is just down from that guy in that room, isn't it?
posted by AppleSeed at 3:52 AM on November 24, 2008


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