Here you'll find the lyrics to many of the songs you'd hear at a typical Sea Water Bliss show. I've designed separate pages for the "art songs" we performed at the Mendel Art Gallery, and for our rock opera, 404 - songs that don't make much sense when taken out of context. (Though we'll still occasionally launch into "White man from Indian Head" or "Dream of the descending satellite", which stand up pretty well on their own.)
Recent additions.
January 4 2009. Added links to unfinished recordings of The protest singer and Brian Zerff and Brian Gash.
May 2 2008. Added lyrics and links to music videos for You're not the one. Added links to live performances of Jesus loves you and The growl hole.
September 30 2007. Added a link to our music video for The ice age.
Adelaide (Please don't leave me now)
read lyrics | download mp3
A friend of mine threw a party to which all attendees were expected to bring a talent to share with the group. Everyone assumed I would be bringing my guitar, so I decided to foil them by bringing my ukulele instead. Of course, that necessitated my actually learning how to play a song on the ukulele; and after a little bit of experimentation, I decided it was much easier to write a new song than it was to learn a pre-existing one.
The band known as Sea Water Bliss
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Our theme song, which lay dormant in my unfininished-songs pile for about three years, until I finally figured out how to make the lyrics work by chopping out all the crappy verses. This is based loosely - very loosely - on a poem my father wrote when I was a kid. In his version of the story, the hero is the manager of an undersea jazz band made up of fishes, sea snails, and octopi, who in the end goes crazy and slaughters the whole band using shards of broken dinnerware. My version is a little less loony. Debts acknowledged to Coleridge and Gordon Lightfoot.
Brian Zerff and Brian Gash
read lyrics | download VERY ROUGH demo
Brian Zerff and Brian Gash are real people, and I'm expecting to get a call from their lawyers any day now. A disclaimer: as far as I know, the "real" Brian Zerff and Brian Gash never went on a crime spree in a stolen car. There. Now my butt is covered.
Clowns
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There actually aren't any clowns in this song. I think it was inspired by the evil Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime in the old Marvel comic books.
Communists everywhere!
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I guess there was a time when it seemed like the Soviet Union really posed an existential threat to western civilisation. From our comfortable post-historical vantage point it's easy, but probably not fair, to poke fun at the delusions of Cold Warriors on either side. But no-one said I was fair.
Curl up and die
read lyrics | listen to sample
Originally, there was a song called "Pretty girl", which was folded into the first incarnation of our rock opera and given to a female character, necessitating a quick sex change operation, whereby it became "Foolish boy". Alas, I regretted that, with the gender switch, I could never again sing it in public without having people giggle at me. When we revived the show for the Fringe, we realised that the song was too jaunty and cheerful to be included in any self-respecting rock opera, and anyway, the lyrics sucked. So we cut it. Now it's on its own again, jaunty and cheerful as ever, with the original lyrics but another new name - "Curl up and die" - to reflect my conviction that cheerfulness should always be leavened with a little suicidal morbidity. The chorus of Ba-ba-bas at the end may be the catchiest thing I've ever written.
The growl hole
read lyrics & view video | download mp3
Perhaps I shouldn't advertise this, because it's not very rock-n-roll, but in several respects this band has been strongly influenced by my father, who wrote a poem called "The band known as Sea Water Bliss" when I was a little kid, and who also used to tell me stories about a boy who found a Growl Hole and travelled around the world battling pirates and mobsters. True, these tales were mostly an excuse for my dad to "Grrrrrrowl!!" at the top of his voice, scaring the crap out of me. Anyway, this was going to be the first song in a children's musical play that I had every intention of writing, before I realised that the song already said pretty much everything I wanted to say.
Note: "The growl hole" works best with a cute girl (ideally in a nurse's uniform) doing all the growls. Charlotte Brandrick? Are you out there? I dedicate this song to you.
Half my age
The ice age
In 2007 we created a music video for this song using scenes from the as-yet-unfinished short film "Haunting Simon", written by me, directed by JW Arnold. Click on the link above for the music video. You can read the script of the short film here.
Jesus loves you (Jesus hates me)
My evil child
Orange F. Raisin
"Orange if raisin" enjoyed a brief stint as the acknowledged Worst Song We've Ever Written, until some new abomination replaced it the following week. It would have been quickly forgotten, except that our new drummer, Dean, misheard the title as "Orange F. Raisin". A few years later, Andrew had the brainstorm of composing a song about a suicidal rock star with that name. He sent me his lyrics by email, and I spent the afternoon "improving" them (I think, unfortunately, that we've since lost Andrew's original draft of the lyrics, though I'm pretty sure the chorus, at least, is as he originally wrote it) and coming up with music. We played it at a few parties, and it received a polite reception, and probably would have been forgotten again, if our friends Jenn and Kurt didn't lobby so persistently for us to revive it every time we played. Now it's back in the setlist, with a neat little guitar solo by Olin. And so "Orange F. Raisin" marches on...
The Palace of Justice is burning down
The protest singer
Song of Syracuse
Song of the severed heads
That happy finger
In an earlier draft this song included a verse about the Athenian siege of Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, but that section was exported into the Song of Syracuse. The image of a "happy finger" guiding the ship comes from a passage in Herodotus or somewhere, in which sailors setting out on a voyage of conquest see an enormous hand in the sky pointing them toward certain victory. Now I can't find the passage, and it may have never existed.
PS. More recently I reviewed Dan Simmons' novel about the Franklin expedition, The Terror, over on my blog.
You're not the one
The final song on our debut album. With intro, outro, and Olin's noodling guitar solo, it drags on, perhaps, a shade longer than necessary. John Valby, AKA Doctor Dirty, listened to a demo and said, "Obviously you've got some issues with this bitch, but do you have to go on about her for six minutes?" (The "bitch" in question is entirely fictitious.) Jay Arnold directed a music video for this song, featuring Tina Zimonick as a small-town cafeteria waitress I fall in love with and have creepy daydreams about.
Theme Party: a rock-n-roll tribute to the films of the '80s.
Inspired by Ray Parker Jr.'s theme for "Ghostbusters", I decided it would be fun to try writing a few songs in that vein. I started out with a theme for "Just One of the Guys", a now-forgotten flick about a girl who goes undercover dressed as a boy to expose gender bias in her high school. That one turned out okay, if a little predictable - I haven't included it here - but subsequent efforts were, I thought, more attuned to my own sensibility, if not to the demands of soundtrack-hawking studio marketing departments. In short, if there's ever a "Ghostbusters III", much as I'd love to offer my songwriting services to the filmmakers, they'd probably be wise not to hire me. Just read through the following songs and you'll see why.
Theme from "Teen Wolf Too"
Theme from "Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise"
A while back I changed the lyrics to add a more explicit French Revolution reference to the second verse, which I'd always thought was weak. Perhaps a few more of those five-second visitors will be enticed to stick around.
Call in the Coreys! (Theme from "Dream a Little Dream" and "License to Drive")
Songs you'll never hear
See, I'm pretty cheap, so often when I'm invited to a party, instead of bringing a bottle of wine or a nice gift, I'll bring along my guitar and play a song. No wonder I don't get invited to parties any more.
The ballad of J and K
J is Catholic and K is a heathen, so the idea behind the song is that J gets into heaven and K is stuck outside the gate, too stubborn to come inside.
They fought all day and they fought all night
I threw away my life (and I'm only 29)
read lyrics & view videos | download demo
My dad turned sixty the year I turned thirty - hence, half my age. I sent him the video for this song as a surprise for his sixtieth birthday.
read lyrics & view video
Not intended as the theme song to the cartoon of the same name - although my lyrics might have been improved by the introduction of a wisecracking woolly mammoth.
read lyrics & view video | download mp3
I've got a bag full of song titles that I've always wanted to use, and every once in a while I'll reach into the bag, pull out a title, and see if I can invent a song to go with it. Sometimes the effort pays off, and the bag gets a little lighter.
read lyrics | listen to sample
Dedicated to Renee O'Connor, who played Gabrielle on "Xena, Warrior Princess".
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This song has quite a history. Way back in grade nine or ten - back when Andrew, Brad, Mark, and I were calling ourselves Non Compos Mentis - we composed a song called "Orange if raisin". The chorus, as I recall, was: "Orange if raisin / Knitting spider socks / Stately penguins dancing..." (This is a typical, if unusually awful, example of the kind of lyrics we were producing in those days. Our standard songwriting technique was to sit in a circle and take turns blurting out the first word that popped into our heads, which resulted in such classic formulations as "Toxic stone comb" and "The upper nudge bunny song".)
read lyrics | download mp3
When our friends say, "Play the Russian song!" - this is the one they mean. I guess it has an Eastern European feel. I think I had Kafka and The Castle in mind when I wrote it.
read lyrics | download UNFINISHED demo
Olin frequently takes part in peace marches and hangs around with a lot of long-haired rabble-rousers, so I was a little concerned, when I first played him this song, that he would take it the wrong way. He didn't. Still, every time we play it, I'm half expecting us to be booed off the stage by a crowd of angry hippies. So far it hasn't happened. I guess the hippies have a sense of humour after all. For the record, I am concerned about the waterfowl, but the darter snail can go take a flying leap.
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Pop music needs more songs about the history of ancient Greece and Rome. I've got a couple ideas for rock operas based on stories from Plutarch's Lives. This song was cobbled together from Plutarch's and Thucydides' accounts of the siege of Syracuse (415 BC) during the Peloponnesian War. I couldn't quite squeeze the whole story into verse form, so it's partly related via prose narration.
read lyrics | download acoustic demo
This one is based loosely on the Battle of Beneventum (214 BC) during the Second Punic War, as described by Livy.
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This sounds like it should be about something fun and possibly dirty, but it's actually about the doomed John Franklin expedition of 1845.
read lyrics & view videos
read lyrics & view "unfinished" video | download mp3
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For a while, this was the single most-visited page on our website, presumably because when you Google "revenge of the nerds theme" this page comes up. Most of those visitors realise their error and leave within five seconds, but I like to think that a few of them stick around to explore.
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"Dream a Little Dream", starring Corey Feldman, Cory Haim, and Jason Robards, was the last in a seemingly endless series of mind-transfer comedies that came out in the late '80s; movies whose sole raison d'etre was to exploit the hilarity of mature, "dignified" adults (like Dudley Moore and Judge Reinhold) riding skateboards and cracking their gum. I might just be the first musician to compose a song about the phenomenon. (Because I didn't think it deserved a whole song of its own, I threw a couple verses in there about "License to Drive", starring Cory Haim, Corey Feldman, and a sports car.)
Dean rocks the charrango with Boris Chavez Gomez in La Paz.
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Our friends J and K were getting married, and they asked us to play at their wedding. They had a couple nice Hawksley Workman songs picked out for before the ceremony and during the signing of the registry, but we couldn't come up with anything to play at the end. So I wrote this; the closest thing to a Christian love song that I could bring myself to write.
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Written for the same wedding.
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Written for our friend Warren's twenty-ninth birthday party.