The new song is here — “Vista Drivers,” a parody of Survivor’s supreme cheese classic “Eye of the Tiger.” This one’s for all our homies who have ever built a PC from scratch. Jude and I don’t do it any other way!
It’s a first for us in several ways. It’s the first 80s song we’ve done, it’s the first song we’ve done that isn’t overtly about games, it’s the first time we’ve had a YouTube video of any kind on day one, and it’s the first time we’ve dared cover a song that Weird Al had already parodied first.
This is also the first time we’ve worked in conjunction with someone else’s production. The song was written for the Very Special 100th episode of the Maximum PC No BS Podcast. We are both fans of the mag — if you’re a geek and you’re into PC hardware, you should either be reading Maximum PC on a regular basis or you should feel deep and personal shame for not doing so.
When Editor-in-Chief Will Smith approached us about helping write some parody lyrics, we brainstormed this song (with some key input from Dan’s wife Kat) to fit into the show’s narrative. Part of the fun of their podcast is hearing their editors sing it themselves, but we wanted to do our own version too, so what you’ll hear on the podcast is totally different (and yet remarkably similar). There actually is a slight lyric difference between the two; we gave them some alternates and they used one of them. We’ll leave you to spot it. (Dan and Kat also wrote the parody lyrics for the very last song you hear in the podcast, but we won’t ruin the surprise.) In any case, we were honored to be involved, and it gave us a nice hard deadline for a new song.
Note to the music nerds who A/B this with the original recording by Survivor: Yes, we transposed the key, but so did Al when he did his parody. And we at least think we did a better job than Microsoft Songsmith.