I have long been imagining every day. This timeline may not start out very cheery, but it gets better and better.
Below is a year-by-year analysis of my song parodies.
It was in late June of this year that the Comic Five took up parodying. They made it all about going off of what had been happening in the comic strip I was drawing for my friends at the time. There is not much to say for this chapter of the timeline, as Old War
is the only parody from 2012 to appear on my site (and even then in a very non-canon way). The others were all too inside-jokey to publish without long explanations that only I could have written, and I just plain do not like those anymore (if I ever did) anyway.
Much of 2013 was just more of the same unpublished (for good reason) parodying methods as 2012. However, in late September, the Black Pearl Crew brought their influence upon the parodying process, starting with Squiddy Haze.
By the end of the year there were several parodies that could be salvaged later, and Davy,
which is presented as admittedly problematic, but hilarious for some.
Early this year, the parody album of Cornerstone brought the first parody to not ultimately need to be edited, given a warning label, or deemed non-canon, Blights.
Indeed, half of that parody album was fine, and Apple Delivery
and Icky
gave us some definite hints of more pleasant, reasonable things to come. (It was not foreseen, however.)
More trial and error occurred in the following months, with some keepers, some parodies that would be replaced wholesale later on, most from this time destined to become revised parodies.
Finally, in August, Styx II brought me to my final decision on what I wanted to be canon, and that it did not include anything from the Lego game where I started, or any fan fiction. From what could have been a god-like position over my work, which would obey me like it was meant to now that the Five were gone at least from the parodies, I claim to have given the following One Commandment:
Now, dear domain, undo anything you have developed that would have helped my old subjects. Undo the things that would have kept the Five in charge.
This initially took effect mostly in the parodies, but its first manifestation came in the strip on Tuesday, August 5, 2014, when Bootstrap Bill ceased to be a mere motivation and actually joined the cast. Tying directly into this, the parody content abandoned all ties to Lego and the strip and set about exploring official PotC canon. Much to my disappointment, I had to work long and hard to get my readers to realize that I was no longer a parodist who wrote as if I remembered anything of what happened before.
One can especially see the pirates getting to be themselves as Disney intended in The Pearl Will Sail In.
Also, one need only look at the title of Don’t Let Him Make You Feel It
to know the Five had nothing to do with it, for it is a piece of advice much better than any they would ever follow much less give.
My run of using Styx albums was then finished for the time being with Edge of the Century. The pirates continued to explore what truly was fitting for them with Pearl Tonight
and Back to Tortuga,
while Heart-Cutter
presented another well-used example of a song that did not have to be turned into its opposite like what happened in so many of my non-canon parodies because the song was already so much like the story I had in mind.
Now that I knew once and for all what I wanted, I went out of this year by giving myself a challenge with the Ultravox compilation The Collection.
The year started off continuing the Ultravox trend with Brilliant. For something a little different, I told the story of a certain antagonist with the singles What Kind of Fool is He,
Love in the Midnight,
Bleeding Out,
and Man in the Wilderness.
I then went off into songs very familiar to me and my readers, starting with Outside Looking in the Best of The Gin Blossoms.
I was then drawn to some familiar but difficult albums. A year after the parody revolution, I was ready to demonstrate just what I was capable of with Kilroy Was Here, and in doing so, introduced the Navy into my domain with My Time.
Doing things like this was in the service of the long-term goal behind the One Commandment: to explore all the things the Five were prejudiced against. (In this case, for instance, their hogging the spotlight had meant that many characters and even entire organizations, like the Navy, never got to be seen.)
The year ended with me doing Paradise Theatre.
This year in parody albums started with me taking on the ultimate challenge, American Idiot. The only comparable thing I had left after this was another Green Day concept album, 21st Century Breakdown, but I decided that went beyond challenge.
From here on out, deciding what to parody was a matter of simply realizing what songs I could work with.
The first album I chose with this new method was Dookie, a much earlier Green Day album, upon realizing that I could use Long View for a film critique. The second album I chose this way was the REO Speedwagon recording You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish, having been tipped off by the fact that Runnin’ Blind was about someone going crazy. I did then, however, let connections take charge again and bring me to another REO album, Hi Infidelity.
With Green Day having put out a new album, Revolution Radio, in 2016, I got this year in parodies going by making use of that brand new source of fodder.
In the quest to undo the works of the Comic Five, I turned to the Journey album Escape in the spring to write a much better new parody of its opening track than the first stab taken at it, Do Stop the Creepin’.
Soon after, the Journey connection brought me to do the album Frontiers.
After this, I found myself with fewer albums that would work for me and fewer connections between them. The search was once again on for whatever worked, which turned out to be the first album by Information Society.
This was a year of very low activity on parodies, partly because I ended my Lego Pirates daily strip this year and therefore did not need parodies to help provide material for that anymore, but also because I had used all the most obvious best choices by now. Living in Oz was the only parody album this year. I did, however, get more into parody singles, with Aversion,
Crazy Love
and Wheel at the Helm
all being written this year.
Parodying may have slowed down, but it was not about to stop. It is not necessarily that I find fodder so much as that it finds me. I spent January of this year working on another Rick Springfield album, Tao, having been tipped off about its potential usefulness by a random listening to Written in Rock the month before.
The absence of a daily strip meant there was no immediate incentive to do another album, although I did another parody single, Terror or Tragic (Lost to the Sea)
shortly after finishing Tao. However, the idea I had had for a new, non-Lego strip got more serious, as I already had parodies ready to run in it.
On September 1, 2019, I launched a new strip for my friends to read, Dance of the Centuries. It opened with a series about Jack Sparrow getting hold of a charmed chronometer that let him go to the future, to explain how he got hold of the songs I parody - no more Lego meant no more taking anachronistic things for granted.
There have been a number of times that Jack, in this strip, temporarily lost the chronometer. At the beginning of the second week of Dance of the Centuries, it fell into the hands of Davy Jones, allowing him to be the one taking and using the songs. Give Me Death,
Sadness Song,
and Brine Stew
were written for this storyline.
Now that my usual characters were once again making regular appearances, I gave them more material by doing two Loverboy albums over the fall.
In late October 2019, I began working on web pages. I knew that my site would let me write parodies for my own amusement, unconcerned about whether my readers were familiar with the original songs. As soon as I had worked out how to write a parody page I took advantage and wrote Tear You Up
as the first of the exclusivities to my site, without anyone knowing.
I ended the year by doing one more Rick Springfield album, Working Class Dog, and setting about work on a second parody batch for Davy.
A week into February 2020, Green Day released a new album. Having run low on fodder, I put it to use almost immediately.
In the spring, I turned to Pat Benatar, whom I had thought about using before, but not all of her songs serve me well. I settled for her Best Of compilation for the most good choices.
After this, I found myself moving away from my usual preference of simple rock with two artists who could be rocky but were not as consistent about it as most of my previous choices, The Motels and Phil Collins. In between those two picks, the difficulty in finding more fodder became apparent, and it was hard for my readers to help. Most of what all of us knew really well, I had either used or rejected by now. I had had my attention drawn to Blondie and The Cars by one friend, but only a few Cars songs had much fodder, and, for reasons explained here, Blondie just inspired me to sing, The tide is high but this song has just/Three lines it repeats endlessly/Have not the kind of hobby that can get by just with that, oh no!
The things Billie Joe Armstrong did for me this year did not end with him singing the new Green Day album. Several months later he released a solo single, Whole Wide World, that is promised to be coming to this site sometime, for it showed me fodder like I had never heard before, something I would no longer have believed possible by now.
I am not planning to do another album anytime too soon, as no definitive winners followed Phil Collins. I developed the suspicion that my future is full of singles.