Friday, January 11, 2019

Mister Rogers Graduation Speech Song



MRROGERS
This is a song about Fred Rogers coming and speaking at my Dartmouth graduation. It's the next song in the continuing series of songs about a fucked up school. (See below if you're new to this here blog or have no idea what I'm talking about).

See, this song can go 2 different ways. It could be a song about kids being at a fucked up school, who got fucked up by that school, and Mister Rogers coming to make them feel better.

But it could also be a song about real life. See, as I said above, he was the commencement speaker at my graduation, and I've been thinking a lot about him and that speech he gave. As a result, I decided to write a song about the day he came and gave that speech. It was a fan-tabulous speech. I think everyone in the audience was blown away. It was the best-est graduation speech in the history of mankind.

A couple notes....

When the song sez, "Mister Rogers came that day to wipe the students' tears away," I'm talking, in part, about how he addressed 9-11 in that there speech. But as I said, above, it could also be him comforting students who got fucked up by their school.

About the picture: First of all, my apologies to Mister Rogers, up in Heaven, if that's not a good likeness of him. Secondly, you'll notice that the graduating students all look like middle aged men. That's because I'm not a very good draw-er, and as such, the only cartoon characters I can draw adequately are middle aged men. Young people and women - I'm not good at drawering them. Poopity poop. Thirdly, I was trying to make the graduating people look like they're being moved to tears by the speech - but they just ended up looking bummed out. Oh, and I accidentally drew the lectern thingy backwards.

Here's a weird fun-fact about the song. There's a line "...to save the goats inside the flock." I didn't watch the Mister Rogers documentary until after I wrote and recorded the song. There's a part where his wife said he was scared he wasn't gonna make it to Heaven or something - and he used goats as a metaphor for people who were not going to go to Heaven. Weird, man. Maybe I was all psychic or something when I wrote that line. In any event, if someone like Mister Rogers cain't make it up to Heaven, then all the rest of us are screwed.

Weird mister rogers song mix 2
This is last week's song if you turn it around backwards. Actually, I'm fibbing just a teeny tiny bit. Some of the vocals weren't synchronized with the rhythm in the turned-around version, so I had to mix down some of the vocal tracks separately and then fuck around with the timing of them, relative to the rhythm track, in order to make it work.

Here are the lyrics:

Good Old Fred he gave a talk / to save the goats inside the flock
It felt like turning back the clock / to little kid land when things rocked
-
Mister Rogers came that day / To wipe the students’ tears away
Did the angels send him there? / because they dropped the ball but they still care

Mister Rogers said that it’s a privilege to be right here
And that kindness is the best / it takes away the darkest fear

Mister Rogers came that day / To wipe the students’ tears away
Did the angels send him there? / because they dropped the ball but they still care

I cannot believe how good that talk was
It made you feel better and I think that is because
There’s a person in the world who is him
Beaming tons of light on the souls that got dim
I wish Mister Rogers could come right back
To make us feel better even when our days are black
But Jesus up in Heaven said they needed him there
To sing away the darkness in a world that does not care
It is a beau- beautiful day. Neighbors are nice. They come out and play.

One day, I started writing a song about a fucked up school. Then, a few days later, that lawsuit came out, involving those pervy professors in the Dartmouth Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I was all, oh, my stars!!! That's where I got my Ph.D.! Then I finished writing the song about a week later. I thought it was just a song about how the school system fucks up kids, but after I finished writing and recording it, I realized parts of it were about my experiences in that poopy psych department (the unconscious mind works in mysterious ways). In any event, I decided to write an album about a fucked up school in order to process my experiences of having been in that department and how the culture there impacted me. This album ain't necessarily about Dartmouth, per se. It's more of a weird, inner exploration where I'm, like, having a fucked up dialogue with my unconscious about my experiences at Dartmouth. Jung used to call that kind of stuff "active imagination." 

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