Not A Blog™

This was a really fun project. It’s pretty geeky; it helps to have a passing familiarity with Settlers of Catan. If you’ve never played the board game Settlers of Catan—whew. You don’t know what you’re missing. I was introduced to it a few months ago and I love it. Someone gave me the idea a while back to write a song about Settlers. I had actually started on this project, but for various reasons—including technical difficulties and lack of time—I never got very far. But the idea never left me.

More recently I got the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero. I think it’s really great, but I can also understand if it’s not your particular cup of tea. As I was listening to it, though, I was thinking, I can do this. (If you haven’t noticed, an inordinately large number of my projects start with me seeing someone else’s stuff and saying, “I can do that”—even though, ultimately, I can’t.) Of course I take almost nothing seriously, so I needed an appropriately mundane topic to write the song about. It wasn’t much of a leap for me to start thinking about doing a song about Settlers of Catan in the style of NIN. Once that lodged in my brain, it was as good as done.

Like all the songs I write, it took on a life of its own about five bars in. To that end, it’s not much like standard NIN fare now that I’ve finished it. I suppose you could say it was inspired by Year Zero, but as to whether it is Weird-Al-esque in its perfect mocking of that glitchcore industrock style, no. I can’t say that it is. If you’re familiar with my older stuff (still not back online since the old site went down) you’ll probably agree that it’s closer to my own style than anything Trent Reznor has done. In particular, it’s really “heavy”. I can’t seem to get away from that.

Additionally, I have to mention again that I’m a terrible singer. Yes, I’ve mentioned this before—but now you’re about to hear my terrible singing, full blast. On occasion I have these great song ideas, but I’m helpless when it comes to execution. In fact, this is my first song with any sort of lyrics or words at all. Fortunately, it’s mostly just monotone chanting—but even then I only occasionally hit the one note I’m supposed to. I don’t sing “notes”, I sing “approximate tonal areas”. (It doesn’t help that the notes are at the very lowest end of my range. As I type this I still have a sore throat from trying to sing so “low”.) The least I can do is throw filters and crap on the vox to disguise the worst of my errant pitch bends. One of these days I’ll actually learn how to use the vocoder to fix my natural detuning. Until then, the vocals are adequate at most. On the other hand, since NIN is all about the dissonance anyway, you could just view this as a subtle satire. Yeah, actually. Do that.

Despite these obvious and potentially ear-bleeding flaws, I hope you at least get a laugh.

[Click here to play, right click to download 3.8 mb]

Lyrics:
Settle
by Ted “Pulsar” Stoltz

Brick—
I need to build a road I need brick
I need to get to that eight wheat hex
Next turn I need to roll a six

Four—
Instead I got another ore
That resource, I don’t need any more
‘Til I get that two-to-one ore port

Rolled a seven, moved the robber
Stole a wheat and bought a dev card
Got the chapel, one more VP
Closer now but still need a sheep

Two more roads and I got longest
Just one army for the largest
I have to choose: different tactics—
Strike strong or build infrastructure?

(Infrastructure)
(Infrastructure)

Wood—
I got the brick but now I need wood
Can I trade my ore? Maybe I could
Or save it for a city? I should

Two—
I can’t do anything new
Resources on this board are too few
What would Klaus Teuber do?

Rolled a seven, moved the robber
Stole a wheat and bought a dev card
Got the chapel, one more VP
Closer now but still need a sheep

Two more roads and I got longest
Just one army for the largest
I have to choose: different tactics—
Strike strong or build infrastructure?
[Repeat 3x]