Recently, my wife and I got hooked on Weeds. The show. Not the… OK, well that too, but… We missed the boat when first it sailed, but thanks to Netflix we can watch all of the episodes of a season in one day without having to wait a week to satiate our weeds fix. You know the scene: “Should we watch one more?” “I don’t see why not.” “We’re kind of losing money if we don’t.” “Yeah. Spark up another episode, mang.” Except for that last bit, that is pretty much the way everyone that I know watches shows these days. That or Hulu.

Somewhere in the middle of the second season, I remarked how I liked that for each episode a different artist does their version of the theme song during the opening credits, but there’s just one problem: they are all (most) terrible. Especially the ones that you are expecting to be good, i.e., The Decemberists. I love love love their album Picaresque, but really?!? That’s all they could do with the theme? Someone gave them carte blanche to interpret it however they see fit, and they did it straight, save for the minor section which is pretty could. And maybe I could give them a pass, as their usual sound is of a folksy, bookish pallor. But what about Regina Spektor? Boo-ring. Death Cab For Cutie? Laughable. I can do a better version than any one of these suckas.

So I did. Last Sunday morning, I awoke at 8 am with the fierce intention to record my own take on “Little Boxes”. I knew that I wanted to change the time signature, as well as indulge my penchant for 8-bit, Super Mario-esque instrumentation, but the modulation for the last verse was a surprise even to me. Finally around 3 pm, I had reached a point in the music where I was very happy. I bounced a mix down to disc, ripped the video of the opening credits from one of my Netflix discs, and launched Final Cut to synch the audio and video together. That’s when something extraordinary happened.

My song matched up *exactly* with the timing all of the visual events, like SUVs pulling out onscreen, people running by onscreen, and cuts from one scene to the next. It was as if I had intentionally done it that way, and I’d love to take credit for being a genius, but it was purely accidental. It was more noticeable before I added vocals, but as an instrumental it wasn’t cutting it (initially I did a keyboard lead in place of the melody, but it was calling for voices so I laid down a bunch until it sounded like a song). Now I’ve posted both instrumental and vocal versions to YouTube for public consumption. Enjoy! Next, I’m gonna do a rendition of The Wire’s theme song “Way Down In A Hole”!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MZuIyid_eQ