You Can Call Me HAL
Fairly obvious what inspired this one.
The Cloner Man
So, yeah, I had to get in on the "Wellerman" thing. This is connected to Matthew Legare's Institute for Irate Science project, imagining one scientist's... creative... solution to quarantine loneliness.
Doctor Joan
Dr. Joan Feynman died in July 2020. Her brother, Richard, was of course much, much more famous, with a Nobel Prize and a wealth of stories to his credit. But his little sister, a world acclaimed expert on auroras and the magnetosphere, wasn't exactly a slouch. This is to Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps' Joan of Arc song "Joan."
Twisty Passage
This is sort of my own version of Frank Hayes' "When I Was a Boy" — a nostalgic look at some of the earliest command-line computer games like Adventure/Colossal Caves and Zork, set to Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage" by way of Wm. Mark Simmons' "Goddard Passage."
Take Force
May 4 is celebrated as Star Wars Day ("May the Fourth Be With You") and as Dave Brubeck Day (5/4, as in the time signature of his quartet's legendary "Take Five," composed by saxophonist Paul Desmond). I thought: Why not both?
Psycho Kitten
Another Talking Heads parody, examining feline behavior to the tune of "Psycho Killer."
Mousieborn
Another short piece mashing up the "Pinky and the Brain" theme by Tom Ruegger and Richard Stone with Jeremy Soule's music for Skyrim...
Lemons
One-chorus-and-verse quickie that I sometimes use as a sound check, TTTO the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House" and inspired by Cave Johnson's final speech in Portal 2...
Cover Your Face
Inspired by a recent trip to the grocery store (noses, folks, noses). This turns out to be a parody of a parody, since Eric Idle swiped the tune for "Sit On My Face" from a 1930s song called "Sing As We Go."
Hotel Draenor
From 2014, and two — soon to be three — World of Warcraft expansions ago. If you were playing an Alliance character the music that played in your garrison — your home base for the Warlords of Draenor expansion — had a chord progression resembling a certain Eagles tune...