New Recording!: "Happy Hour Made Me Unhappy"

wredfright · Happy Hour Made Me Unhappy

"Happy Hour Made Me Unhappy" was originally a poem, but I figured it would work better as a song, so I wrote some music for it a few years later.  It was the first song I wrote after a couple years of being away from writing songs and playing music, and I suppose I was easing my way back into things by only having to write the music for lyrics that already existed.  I haven't had a dry period since, but there's nothing wrong with the occasional field lying fallow, so I don't really mind them.  I learned long ago how to hack out a song if I needed to, but I'd rather wait for and nurture the good ones along.  There's something to the Guided By Voices approach of write lots and let the cream come to the top (though GBV seems to ultimately release everything), but I prefer the opposite approach of trying to make every song count.  There's an earlier noisy demo version of "Happy Hour" you can read about at https://www.wredfright.com/2017/12/song-happy-hour-made-me-unhappy.html and hear at Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/wredfright/3nd).  As I wrote then, "I suppose it's a bit of a murder ballad, but it's not technically a ballad.  The singer of the song should definitely have just DTMFA, as Dan Savage would say (Google it if you don't know), and gone on Tinder.  Instead, he's going to jail."  I also had an earlier ep of the same title, but, like Elvis Costello sometime did, I didn't write the song until later.  This is the first track from this year's album of rerecordings, entitled Noisy And Not So Noisy, covering the songs from 2017 to 2020 or so that didn't get the full treatment then.  Musically, it's the usual vocals, guitar, keyboard as bass, and drums (or drum as I decided to let the weird instrument provide any non-snare percussion).  For the weird instrument this time, I "played" a 1996 Taco Bell Star Wars toy of the Millennium Falcon that made a cool enough noise that I made it the main percussion.

Thanks to my pal Loren in Iowa for playing "Smooth Jazz Riot" on his best of 2022 radio show!

For more Wred Fright music, listen to the Yeast? 7"!