Other content : The Bill Cosby Song

My high school career was spent trying to go on as many field trips as was possible. It was for this reason that I went to mini-courses at Queen’s University three years in a row. And what did I get out of my $400 investment (per year) beyond an excuse to miss a week of school? The greatest song ever written. Well, maybe not. But it’s up there.

The song was written during my second year of mini-courses when I was taking audio recording techniques with Pat Adams. Wayne Deering was teaching the course, and his (alleged?) work on that "Macarena" song earned him much respect from the class. Pat and I insisted that we work entirely with analogue equipment, so we ended up with a belt-driven turntable, an eight-track reel-to-reel, and a 32-track mixing board. Pat hummed the synthesizer track he had in mind and the guy in our group who knew how to play piano (maybe?) played it using a Roland SH-101 synthesizer. Another guy in our group did the drumming using a hand drum with a shirt stuffed in it and a snare. Even in a professional studio, you wouldn’t see production values much better than that.

My role was basically limited to saying the “You’ll need a helmet” parts of the opening and setting up the turntable to loop the part of the record that we wanted to loop. I also co-produced and mixed the song with Pat, I guess. (I want all the credit I can get for this gem...)

So now that I’ve talked the song up far too much, I may as well let you download it. Don’t say that you haven’t been warned, though — this isn’t exactly high art. Pat and I didn’t really figure out a title for the song until this year, and Aggravate My Soul is the name he records under with his brother Bill. ’Cause I know you were wondering.

Meanwhile, thanks for Luke for sending us his minidisc copy of the song, and if I ever figure out who the other kids in my group were, I’ll credit them, too. If they’re into that sort of thing.