If you can't find a particular song listed here, remember there are separate sections for the Art Songs we wrote for the 2002 John Will exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery, and for our rock opera 404.
Recentish additions.
August 7 2012. Uploaded video of our performance of Dream of the descending satellite from our house party / farewell concert in June. Also, finally uploaded images from our 2010 puppet show performance of Song of Syracuse at the Mendel Art Gallery.
January 27 2010. Added a link to our recently uncovered 2008 music video for The band known as Sea Water Bliss.
December 8 2009. Added a link to the new music video for Clowns.
January 4 2009. Added links to unfinished recordings of The protest singer and Brian Zerff and Brian Gash.
Adelaide (Please don't leave me now)
Brian Zerff and Brian Gash
Clowns
The music video contains neither clowns nor comic books, but brims with high-speed binder-flipping action.
The growl hole
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
The Palace of Justice is burning down
The protest singer
Song of Syracuse
In 2010 Andrew and I, with the help of our friends Steve Barss and Troy Mamer, created a cardboard puppet show to accompany this song for a performance at the LUGO Festival at the Mendel Art Gallery.
Song of the severed heads
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 minute or four 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.
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.
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
read lyrics & view video
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 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.
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.
read lyrics & view video
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
read lyrics and view puppet show images
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.
read lyrics & view videos
read lyrics & view "unfinished" video | download mp3
Inspired by Ray Parker Jr.'s theme for "Ghostbusters", I decided it would be fun to try writing a few songs inspired by the movies of my childhood. Three of these songs wound up in our regular repertoire, and I'm including two of them here. Unfortunately, they wound up being as much about my memories of these movies as they are about the movies themselves. So 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.
read lyrics
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.
Dean rocks the charrango with Boris Chavez Gomez in La Paz.