We’ve got a few different projects in the works, and we hope they will be out to you this year. Maybe not — since this is a hobby and not a day job, the schedule tends to be rather…elastic. But here’s a few updates on where our heads are at:
PAX East 2011
Both Jude and Dan will be at PAX East in Boston this March. Since Jude lives nearby and I gets to go to the show for work (I’ll be on a few panels), it’s one of the rare times to see us both in the same room. Last year we sat in the food court and had pizza together with some folks who were actually interested in admitting publicly that they liked our songs — and we’ll likely do something like that again. We had pitched an official panel, wherein we were going to go over our theories and suggestions for writing game parodies, then actually write one with the audience, right then and there, but that panel didn’t get the green light (they always get way, way more pitches than they can approve). But we’ll be there all the same, so watch for meet-up details a little closer to the big event.
Song #1
We need cool codenames for projects in development, but for now, let’s just call it Song #1. Jude and I hatched this one early last year but it was put on the back burner in favor of the AGS video. I dragged my feet but finally combined our lyric ideas into something cohesive late last year, and Jude has been cranking on drums and keys for several weeks now. Whereas AGS featured a lot of guitars, this one is a great spotlight for Jude’s keyboard work. However, we realized early on that, due to the subject matter, this also needed a video — but we need to collaborate with someone to make it happen. So even though this song will likely be the first one completed this year, it won’t be released until we can get that squared away — we really want to debut it as a video. It simply makes more sense. We’re contacting potential video partners privately but we might have to show our hand a little bit on this one if we can’t find someone surreptitiously.
Song #2
We usually try to lock down the lyrics before we start recording the parts of a song. Last year at PAX East, I remember talking to Jude about an idea, and he liked it too — and then I wound up writing the lyrics pretty much immediately, which rarely happens. So that’s on my hard drive, and it’s about a topic that is still relevant. The delay won’t hurt this one, and we might be able to pull off a video with the right planning.
Song #3
It’s usually tough to take someone else’s idea and make it into a song — humor is subjective and if we don’t know the game in question as well as you do, it’s hard to pull off. But someone suggested something to us recently that we both instantly got — it was a recognizable song with a recognizable piece of gaming culture, and it made us both laugh. We knew it would not only work but it was something that PSwap could really pull off. This idea was going to be the root of the PAX panel — it seemed appropriate to have a song that came from the community be completed by the community — but the panel’s not happening, so we’re going to do it ourselves. This might be done before Song #2, because it’s making us both giggle a lot and that’s usually a sign that it’s on the fast track.
There are other ideas too — we’ve been considering a long-form musical project, but it’s pretty ambitious and we simply don’t know if it can be done at this point — but those are the ones at the front of the line. So…it’s not that we aren’t thinking or working or playing with stuff for 2011. We want to get these songs out there, honest. We just have to do things one at a time.