Track 8: Stump the Fee!

so on to part 8...

TRACK 8: STUMP THE FEE!

single cover

Oh this song, this was a tough one. The original version had the working title 'X denotes the negative' and was scrappy at best. With badly recorded guitars (by me) and an overabundance of bongo tracks, it was a hard sell. Macey was not a fan, and I kept pushing him to work on it. He tried hard to get it to work, but alas, it wasn't having any of it. It was a block that I had faith we could get over.

This was (in my humble opinion) the strongest song lyric set on the album, and I really wanted it on there. In a last attempt to appease me, Macey took a musical butchers knife to the song, stripping it bare and starting again.

Macey wrote this song in that move, changing the chords and structure, and coming out with a banging dance number unlike any other tune on the record. We redid the vocals and added in the sample of me pretending to be a TV economics professor from the university of selfrightousville, and BAM! it was there.



For the video for this song (see completed article just above these words), I delved into my editing past, strapped on my 'key phrases' lampshade and went spelunking at ye old prelinger archive (it's a website with copyright free video material available to anyone). Being the thrifty fellow that I am, using my free copy of windows movie maker and several copyright free hours of old footage, I constructed a nice recycled video. It took me ruddy ages to do because movie maker kept crashing and burning under the weight of all the files, by version 15 I had it locked in.

Retroactively this new version of the song was converted once more, into acoustic form. Here is the video result of that transformation. This is closer in chordage to the original version.


Moving on, as previously mentioned way back in the introduction, many songs were worked on that had been written by Macey and Nick. These songs had a different feel to my songs, and I enjoyed writing lyrics for them. While 6 or 7 were recorded and worked on, only one of them made it to the album: Kids Play Games. (coming up in the next part)

Thanks for being present

Peace and infinite loveliness

Andy Jackson (Cosmic Bos)