👆 That's 🔜
🌏 This Saturday morning for Australia/NZ/Japan/SE Asia,
🌎 This Friday evening for Americas
🌍 ⚠️ Psst for European and African listeners: there may be a live sound test/rehearsal before, Friday morning your time, which you can drop in on. Watch this space!
#RFFF #RFFF25 #LiveMusic #FilkDiaries #Filk
"Brillo, Spit-Brillo", a filk of the song from Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Mikado", is now released as track 2 on my novelty song album "The Wreck of the Ella Fitzgerald". Please enjoy!
https://music.futzle.com/wreck-of-the-ella-fitzgerald/
#BrilloSpitBrillo #Filk #FilkDiaries #NoveltySong #NewMusic #SingerSongwriter #IndyMusic #Comedy #BigBoatStuck
It’s official! An encore performance of my sellout* December live concert is returning in July!
« A Christmas in July Wasted with Deb Pickett »
Featuring all my terrible song parodies, original novelty songs, and some new material!
• Clank! I Just Thought of The Romans Again 0️⃣
• I’ve Written a Self-Referential Major-General Parody
• Brillo, Spit-Brillo
• Pooper Scooper
• Big Boat Stuck (with a new verse! Two if you help another ship run aground)
TOWORROW! Saturday 26 July 2025, 0h00 UTC (Saturday morning for my side of the Pacific, Friday evening for the other side of the Pacific, I’m So Sorry for the outside of the Pacific) at https://party.radiofreefedi.net/ thanks to @radiofreefedi
#RadioFreeFedi #RFF #RFFF #RFFF25 #LiveMusic #SingerSongwriter #Filk #FilkDiaries #Clank
For Reasons, I have the lyrics to Elton John's "Nikita" (1985) open in a tab.
Fucksake Bernie, those are some of the worst rhymes in history.
in <-> friend
world <-> know
TBH I'm not even sure these were meant to rhyme, though their partners elsewhere in the song do.
You would think this makes it easier to filk, but it makes it harder.
I've stumbled on a full score of G&S's The Mikado, including the thirteen-part orchestral arrangement for Act II, song 11 (Ko-Ko's song). This'll be the most authentic-sounding "Brillo, Spit-Brillo" you've ever heard.
Once I get my voice back. *grumble*
https://en.opera-scores.com/O/Arthur+Sullivan/The+Mikado.html
Some surviving filk:
"Old Dead Modem Blues" (1994?) was short enough that it stayed in my head all by itself. I didn't add the extra verses until 2021.
"Space Parity" (1995?) I admit was just about perfect theming, and the way I could have the filk lyrics cross over with the actual Bowie lyrics in places meant that it was able to survive in my head all those years with no mutation. It's literally unchanged from when I penned it.
"Pooper Scooper" isn't actually all that old; I think I wrote the chorus in 2013 and posted it on Twitter. Tight rhyming, again, is what helped that one to not be forgotten, and when I came to write the verses and bridge last year, all I needed to do was go back and make sure I'd remembered the Abba song correctly, because that song is from an album I barely know.
It's funny where I find my jottings. At one point I was using IMAP notes because iOS supported them, and it wasn't till I was cleaning those out and moving the notes to iCloud years later that I came across the completely forgotten "Brillo, Spit-Brillo". I padded it out to the requisite three verses with a story arc last year.
"I've Written a Self-Referential Major-General Parody" must be from the mid nineties, based on the poor rhyming I tolerated back then. I don't think I actually had it written down anywhere but when I committed it to paper for last year's concert, out it came from my brain, intact.
Now that I've decided I'm going to record some of the filk I've written over the years https://music.futzle.com/wreck-of-the-ella-fitzgerald/ I'm starting to surface submerged memories of some of the stuff I wrote way back.
There was a full four-verse-and-chorus rendition of Piano Man, called Pacific Link ("Send us a ping, oh, Pacific Link") which somehow one of Australia's IT magazines picked up and reprinted. I remember it was pretty terrible technically, with rhymes I'd reject outright today. If you find it, keep it to yourself because it's credited to my deadname.
There was The Little Barmaid, a full-on movie script that a friend from Usenet rec.arts.disney and I wrote, parodying scene-by-scene The Little Mermaid. We got it 80% done but didn't nail the ending and never went back to it. I still remember some of it. Ariel's sisters all had names of cheap compact cars: Torana, Barina, Cortina, etc. Ariel wanted to work for a merchant bank but she was terrible with numbers and signed away her soul in a song called Poor Incompetent Dolls. Well, you get the idea. It's best that it's lost, unless you kept a copy Richard.
There's Honours Rhapsody, a Queen parody which I cowrote with a fellow student, that managed to sneak a shitton of Unix terminology into it. Best consigned to the bin, but I do remember the haunting coda "Anything but Windows®". Anyway, I don't think my collaborator went on with his musical career, which might be for the best.
Deborah Pickett