Tag Archives: true

#1421: Datarock – True Stories

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As, I don’t know… controversial (?) a company EA Sports may be, I’ve got to thank whoever was in charge of the music team during those mid- to late-2000s because their game soundtracks were on a another level. I was a FIFA player in those times, something I’ve mentioned before, and the playlists they had on the games introduced me to a lot of bands, artists and songs that I would never have known about. They played a big part in the formation of my musical interests, for sure. Datarock were one of those groups. In FIFA 08, their song ‘Fa-Fa-Fa’ was among those playing in the background as I navigated the menus. I liked that one, remember singing along to it many a time. And whoever was on the playlist selection team must have been a fan, because a year later Datarock were part of the soundtrack in FIFA 09 with ‘True Stories’. It was a completely new song, hadn’t been released officially anywhere else and was seemingly a FIFA exclusive.

I liked this one too. Still do now, but you get what I mean. It was an earlier version of the track where the band hadn’t yet written an entirely new second verse, so they just repeated the first again. And the words were easy to remember. “Born under punches / Crosseyed and painless / Slippery people / I’m not in love. Really liked how the melody rises with each line until they reach the peak with “I’m not in love”. Very fun to sing. “Houses in motion / Road to nowhere / Once in a lifetime / I’m not in loooooove”. Good times. Then it gets all disco-ey during the belted-out choruses. The track’s a lot of fun. I can’t remember exactly when it happened. But I was listening one day and thought, “Hmm. ‘Road to Nowhere’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’… Those are songs by Talking Heads… Maybe…” So I went onto Letssingit.com, my lyrics site of choice back then, searched up Talking Heads, went through their song list, and there was my answer. The lyrics to ‘True Stories’ were made entirely of song titles by Talking Heads. The song itself named after a Talking Heads album. The part where Datarock sing ‘Burning down the house’ was censored on FIFA. Probably because they didn’t want arson promotion on their game. But this revelation made me appreciate the song even more. It didn’t really have any meaning. It’s just a massive Talking Heads tribute in dance-punk form. I think the only unique words in the lyrics are “‘Cause”, “Are”, and “Hey”.

So it was a good part of a year that I was sitting around and playing FIFA 09 whenever time permitted. Before I knew it, 2008 was over, we were now in the year 2009, and FIFA 10 was the new game in the series. Of course I got that too. And wouldn’t you know it, Datarock were in the game’s soundtrack again with ‘Give It Up’. Their third consecutive appearance. By the time of FIFA 10‘s, the duo had released their new, second album Red. ‘True Stories’ is on there as the third track, a little different from the version that was on FIFA 09. In its album form, the song sounds like it had a newly recorded bass line and re-recorded vocals. But the main thing was that it now had a new second verse, obviously consisting of more Talking Heads song titles, including ‘Psycho Killer’, ‘Television Man’, ‘Seen and Not Seen’ and others. This album version got the music video treatment, of which you can see above. And that’s really all I have on Datarock. A liking of football brought me to them, I got to know some great songs in return. All I could ask for.

#1414: Ween – Tried and True

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Just when Quebec was starting to get some love over here, it comes to a swift end. No more Quebec songs are to appear after this one. There is one on the album that begins with ‘Z’. I like it, but not to the extent that I do all the other tracks I’ve written about. So that’s how it is. Literally wrote about ‘Transdermal Celebration’ the other day, so I’ll spare the whole spiel about my feelings on the LP and its context. On that post, I did say there were five numbers on Quebec that would have had their own posts had the time been right. May as well list them out: ‘Among His Tribe’, ‘Happy Colored Marbles’, ‘Hey There Fancypants’, ‘Chocolate Town’ and ‘The Argus’. Always had a great time with those songs in particular. But as I feel I implied in the last post concerning Quebec, the album as a whole is very special. So we say farewell to it, and its last representative comes in the form of its sixth track, ‘Tried and True’.

At the time of writing this, ‘Tried and True’ is the most-played Quebec song on Spotify with 25+ million streams. A good 11 million more than the next. Not quite sure why that happened. Possibly through various playlist inclusions. I really like ‘Tried and True’ myself, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best song Quebec has to offer. But what I think it provides the people is some very easy listening. You just sit back in your most comfortable chair and let yourself sink into it while this song rides out. It’s helped by the fact that, and I’m pretty sure it’s the case, the band recorded it at a faster speed in its original key of C, before slowing it down to how it is on the album. Why would the band do that, you might ask. It just gives the track a certain character, I think. Makes the track sound a bit more spaced out. Hits some certain frequencies that wouldn’t be possible without the production tricks. And plus, it seems that whenever the band worked with producer Andrew Weiss, speed manipulation was the way to go a lot of the time.

In the live performance below, Gene Ween precedes the song by saying it’s one ‘about space and time’. I can’t really argue with that. I would put forward, there’s definitely something sexual about ‘Tried and True’ too. Is that fair to say? There’s certainly some double entendres that support that theory. “I woke, I was alone… rising”. “Rising” could refer to the physical act of getting out of bed or a classic case of morning wood. Then I’d say the song is about waking up with very strong blood flow and feeling untouchable, with a heavily cosmic spin put on it via the lyrics, reinforced by the electric sitar, the pulsating keyboards and floaty background vocals that come in nearing the song’s end. But I may also be completely wrong on that front. It also contains the cheekiest play on words with the “Could you smell my whole… life?” lyric. I tell you, I sung that out loud in front of my sister one time. She looked at me for a second during that pause between “whole” and “life” before I completed the lyric myself. And that was when I should maybe only reserve audible singing for times when there’s no one else in the room.