Wrestling Team pledged to write personalized songs for the people who donated $30 or more to their Fun Jamz Fun-draiser. Several generous people did, and Wrestling Team will be rolling out the hits this week! This one’s for:
Ingrid Frymoyer Shuart
Ingrid is perhaps my oldest friend, or at least among a select few who have known me since first grade. Back at Lorane Elementary, Exeter Township, Reading, Pennsylvania…USA…Earth…Milky Way, etc. Now identity thieves have some more information to go on, if they want to assume my identity. Go ahead, guys! Maybe you can do a better job.
Mark and I tumbled around an initial couple ideas for Ingrid, all of which were, admittedly, awful. Ingrid and her husband, another old friend of mine, live in Alaska. I thought for a moment about doing a Death Cab for Cutie parody of “Why You’d Want to Live Here”, which is a song questioning a friend about why that person wants to live in a shithole like LA. “Who does a Death Cab parody,” I thought. “That’ll be weird and fun.” The more I thought though, Ingrid and Paul do like Alaska. Just because I don’t want to eat permafrost or live anywhere that doesn’t have a Momofuku Milk Bar, doesn’t mean all humans are like that. So scratch that notion.
Ingrid was recently pregnant as well, and then, more recently, not pregnant, as she gave birth to a delightful child. “Mark, what funny songs can we write about pregnancy? Well, the big “secret” about birth is that you poop when you squeeze out a baby. Maybe we could write a song about that?” We both took a moment to think about it and then reject that idea. “Why?” you ask. Well, let me tell you. That’s what we in the comedy biz call a “shitty idea”. Or “an idea that doesn’t make us laugh”. Nix it!
Finally, I thought to ask Ingrid what kind of song she’d like. She replied, “Write a song by a band named Gonos Glottis.” Back in ninth grade biology, Ingrid and I were lab partners and deskmates in Mr. Long’s class. Mr. Long was a good dude. Probably the first real heavy science teacher I had (in sixth grade, at Jacksonwald Elementary, Mr. Jones taught us all about how evolution can’t be true because, analogically, you don’t put a car in a field and it becomes a nicer car over time, right? And hey, we were sixth graders. I bought it. Until I read Stephen Jay Gould a couple years later.), and he was Pennsylvania Dutch, so he said things like “pun’kin” and “furter” (that last one is how he pronounced “fritter”.)
When we were learning the Latin words for things, Ingrid and I would make up a lot of weird pairings. “Gonos glottis” means “reproductive tongue.” I thought about a Current 93-kind of band, weird doom-folk kind of stuff, something like “Moonlight, You Will Say.” Mark and I did a bit at a Weeping Skull months ago called Name That Tune. We would play 10 seconds of a song that didn’t exist, and the gag was that we were doing this because we promised the winner a beer and we were both broke. Hilarious concept! One of the snippets was a weird folky song about a man getting divorced. That was my beginning point.
For whatever reason - my parents are happily married - divorce, sad dads, and broken families are an idee fixe for me, and they keep sneaking into Wrestling Team sketches. Maybe it’s because I never experienced that kind of stuff that I am interested in it. In any event, “The Combat of Sad Dad and Cuchulain” is part Irish folk song, part-tale of an embittered divorced dad. He get’s divorced, loses his welder’s job…also, there’s The Crepuscular Witch! To make the song, I had to fight every urge I had to load it with melodies, and decided instead upon a sparse arrangement of guitar and piano, cello in one part, horns in the bridge (all midi) where I tried to Jeff Mangum it a bit. I indulged myself in the coda to make up for it. The sparseness of the music allows for the insanity of my singing to really stand out well.
I scream a lot in this song.
-Andy
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