Eric Ingrum's Project Blog

The ZEP is alive and well! With the AwesomeStart feature complete and the majority of Double Feature production out of the way, I finally have time to get back to finishing the album.

The second draft of the lyrics/script/whatever is done. A few people were kind enough to record read-throughs with me, so I have some audio to cut up and play around with.

Upon reading it became evident that the words need one more good round of revisions. There's a few things that still come off as a bit obvious. There's another problem that I never saw coming: there's just so damn much of it.

The read-throughs came out to about thirty minutes every time, and I felt like they were even a little fast. There's large sections that monologue a bit to much and I also noticed big passages where there aren't any female characters. It's going to be impossible to get four paragraphs of a single character's speach into a song. I think I'm just going to have to cut some things.

I guess I always knew putting the words to music would require alteration. When I actually get to it, it's goig to be a problem of still conveying the same message in fewer words.

If you ever listen to Double Feature you know that I tend to over-explain things. I don't consider that a problem necessarily. I think of it more as a style. Some people are poets like that. They can convey complex ideas in a very minimalistic way. Simple, powerful ideas.

One of the things I like so much about Ayn Rand (besides objectivism, atheism, and the roots of modern libertarian philosophy) is her tendancy to over-explain. Atlas Shrugged is a perfect example. She takes what only needs to be a page and a half worth of ideas and writes a thousand page novel.

That kind of long-winded approach makes sure you aren't misunderstood. There's no room for interpretation...you're covering every detail of your opinion in such a variety of ways that everyone pretty much has to be on the same page with you. You outline what you want to say, you state how that view might react to opposition, and - best of all - you walk through thought experiments. The ZEP is like a big thought experiment. What would it be like if this actually happened? How would idea X be affected by the extreme Y?

I just hope I can finish this up before the actual political climate of this country beats me to what I thought it was just a cartoonish for-the-sake-of-argument extreme.