Buenos Aires

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Many moons ago I was taking an introductory Spanish course and we were discussing South American countries and cities. When the professor mentioned Buenos Aires, he made an offhand comment about how there wasn’t much bueno aire in Buenos Aires. This struck a chord with me about how it was a humorous example of the kind of false advertising we’re subjected to all the time these days. We’re continually told we will be successful and famous and beautiful if we just consume this or that. Not an original insight, really, but it led to this “cautionary tale” about someone who takes all that to heart and then, inevitably, flames out.

A few years ago I was living in Hawaii. I was taking the opportunity of having a limited recording setup to play around with using movie samples in my music and making sound collage-type things. This is an example of that, and you can clearly hear the beginnings of Buenos in it. The pop and girls screaming sound was from a wedding reception scene from a movie.

Quite silly, obviously, but it was fun to mess around with. When I returned home I set about re-recording it as a more straight-ahead piano-bass-drums-synths song. I still wasn’t happy with it, however, and it wasn’t until I’d bugun recording M&P in earnest that I happened upon the solution: the strings. One of my favorite pop songs in recent memory is Robyn’s “Be Mine!” which uses a cello to drive the verses. I had been working with string samples for The Who’s Tommy anyway, so I put them to work here and liked the result.

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