Episode 6: “godspeed” with bird
This week, Aoife interviews bird about “godspeed” from DEICIDE. “This is, like, something that I care about,” bird explains, “and something that I think other people care about enough that if I make this song, it’s going to be, like, really, really fun and just a good experience.”
bird is a silly little person who gets up every morning and does their silly little music, and you can find her and her silly music on Twitter at @bird_girlfriend and on Soundcloud at soundcloud.com/biiiiiird.
This episode of idol board was edited by Ada Quinn with additional editing by Deidra Skye, hosted by Aoife, produced by Tangereen Velveteen, transcribed by SigilCrafter Aya, and written by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen. Find all episodes and transcripts of idol board at fourth-strike.com/podcast and follow @idolboard on Twitter for updates. Get all episodes plus bonuses by supporting Fourth Strike on Patreon.
Listen to “godspeed” by the garages on Blandcamp:
Episode Transcript
[musical intro plays]ANNOUNCER:
You’re listening to a Fourth Strike production.[The intro and first verse of ‘godspeed’ plays and fades out]
AOIFE:
Hello and welcome to idol board! I’m Aoife, and I use she/her pronouns. In this podcast, I will be interviewing members of the garages about their songs, their creation process, and possible inspirations. My guest for this episode is garages’ band member bird. Thanks for coming on, bird! Can you tell us your pronouns, your presong ritual, and what song you’ll be talking about with us today?BIRD:
She/her, my pregame ritual is crying, and today I’m going to be talking about the song ‘godspeed’.AOIFE:
So, first off, how did you get into blaseball?BIRD:
Um, I first got into blaseball, I think it was probably around like season 3 or 4. I saw somebody I followed on Twitter tweet about it, and also I think one of my friends recommended it to me and… I looked at it and I said “Hey, blaseball that’s- that’s pretty funny” and I kind of got much more into it than I thought I was getting at the time. I pretty much got into blaseball as a gateway to sports proper, because before then I was very much sort of a “I don’t like sports” kind of person? But now it’s just sort of, you know, sports are cool.AOIFE:
I can certainly relate to that. I was never a sports person, and now I’m, like, actually interested in, like, sports strategy and statistics and stuff. So, why did you join the garages- the band, not the team?BIRD:
I first started making music for blaseball, um, because at the time, I was a fan of the Baltimore Crabs, and in their server somebody posted about the announcement for ‘AWAY GAMES’ and I decided ‘You know what, I’ll just- I’ll just take a shot at it’. So I made a pretty bad meme song by a fictional, uh, band called ‘100 Crabs’-[The intro to ‘100 Crabs- UR TOO SLOW’ from ‘AWAY GAMES’ plays, then fades out]
BIRD:
Yeah, after that I decided “You know what? This was really fun” and it was also- sort of made the creative process go a lot faster for me? So I decided to, you know, hop over into the garages server even though I still wasn’t really a garage proper, just to, you know, see how far I could push sort of blaseball as a muse for my music process.AOIFE:
A lot of- a lot of folks that we’ve interviewed here have said similar things about how the creative process goes by really fast for them when they’re working on blaseball stuff. Do you have any ideas why you think blaseball garages music goes by much quicker for you?BIRD:
I think that it’s really- there’s a couple different reasons why, but I think that one of the big motivators for me is that I can have a much closer connection with the people that consume my content? Like, yeah as a solo artist, I throw things up onto Soundcloud and I have some friends who will listen to my stuff and, like, who I talk to a lot about music and that’s very good, but I feel like the motivation is sort of having this prebuilt fan community and having people who I talk to who, like, really, really appreciate and sort of get emotionally attached or emotionally invested in, you know, blaseball in the same way that I do. It really helps motivate me to feel like “Hey, this is, like, something that I care about and something that I think other people care about enough that if I make this song, it’s going to be, like, really really fun, and just a good experience.”AOIFE:
So, we’ve talked a little bit about the differences between the work you’ve done before blaseball and before the garages, and the work you’ve done after. Can you go into more detail about the work that you’ve done before you joined the garages?BIRD:
Yeah, so, I, uh, make music on my sort of solo alias. It’s… extremely different from the music that I make with the, uh, garages, but I think that the garages definitely represent a part of my personal music tastes that I never really got to explore before I got the opportunity to. So my, like, solo music is very indie sort of soft lofi tinged, uh, music that is, like, very much not the vibe of the garages- [Part of bird’s collaboration with adri and cat naps titles ‘imaginary friend’ plays and fades out]BIRD:
It’s actually been really fun to have a sort of, uh, place for me to get myself into that style of music without sort of, staking it and having it be on my personal alias, and have it just sort of be “Hey, this is where I can sort of take some time to learn this style” and have it sort of be separated for now.AOIFE:
Yeah, I definitely get that vibe from ‘godspeed’. Was there a particular, like, subsection of the emo community that you were particularly inspired by for this piece?BIRD:
Yeah, so, sort of the biggest influence for that song was actually an alias of somebody who I feel probably occupies a similar space to me, in that, um, they are a very Soundcloud producer-y kind of person, but they also run a side alias, uh, so it’s luupy’s sort of side alias called ‘plastic daydream’ is a very… sort of different take on a lot of punk and emo-y style of music. Where it’s got some really strange lofi, uh, synths and mixing qualities, and I think that that was probably… that was probably my biggest influence going into the making of ‘godspeed’ and also just for my music for the garages in general.AOIFE:
I- I totally- I totally get that. You’ve done a number of songs with the garages. What was it about ‘godspeed’ that made you want to talk about it on this show?BIRD:
Yeah, so, I’ve only really made two songs for sort of main garages albums. I chose to talk about ‘godspeed’ probably just because it’s the one that I feel like has had the most widespread listeners and it’s had the biggest effect on people who I’ve seen… And it’s also just probably my most… It’s my most serious and sort of emotionally, uh, coherent song.AOIFE:
It definitely feels… like a very emotional piece? And I wonder, was the emotion coming from any particular thing in your life or in blaseball?BIRD:
Yeah, so this was, sort of… after one of the biggest sort of events of blaseball thus far, which was the Crabs ascending… And- as I mentioned before, I was and still am, sort of, primarily a fan of the Baltimore Crabs- and after the Crabs ascended, which was honestly very unexpected for a lot of people… it’s almost indescribable the instant grief and instant- you feeling like you miss something, you realized “Hey the Crabs, they’re just, straight up gone”. Yes we- we were the greatest team that existed in blaseball thus far, but also, like, it’s in the past tense at that point. This is something that we’ve been thinking about for such a long time. This is, like, something that we all ostensibly wanted, and then realizing that, like, perhaps we didn’t really want it?AOIFE:
Yeah, ’cause when I- when I think about the ascension, what I think is really, like, the most interesting fact about it is people cheering for their team for winning, and then it was immediately hit with grief when they realized what it means that they’ve ‘won’. And I think that’s really interesting. It’s a very bittersweet, very nuanced combination of emotions that’s really interesting to unpack and I think your song does a good job of that.BIRD:
Yeah, I think that… It was a song that definitely wrote itself. It came out in a very short period of time and it was very much a, sort of, situation where I didn’t really have the resources to make, sort of, maybe what I envisioned the song to be? But it was just, sort of, a feeling that I felt so strongly that I just, sort of, had to use whatever means I had at my disposal to try to, you know, put all the feelings into a song to get them out there.[The chorus from ‘godspeed’ plays and fades out]
BIRD:
The way that I record lyrics is I’ll just go in and I’ll record- I’ll- I’ll play the instrumental, then I’ll play a bar, and then I’ll record that bar of lyrics, then I’ll wait for a little bit and think of the next bar, and I’ll just keep going through the entire song like that.AOIFE:
Wait.. wait wait wait wait, hold up… you improvised all the lyrics for the song?! That’s- I… I don’t know what to say about that! That’s incredible!BIRD:
That’s one of- that’s one of many, um, very funny things I do in my workflow- funny meaning, you know, atrocious but- So the drums in ‘godspeed’. I wanted to make the drums sound really, really bad, because… when you’re programming drums, unless you wanna spend a lot of money, there’s pretty much no way you come out of it sounding good if your drums are completely dry, and you want them to sound more or less, like, you know, actual drums that have been recorded. So the way that I decided to get around that was bussing them all through a room simulator, and then, like, low passing them, and probably doing some other things on that project I forget.AOIFE:
Yeah, that’s funny… What do you most want us to know about this song? What do you hope fans take away from it?BIRD:
Ultimately, when I look back at this song, I think that it sounds… not very good. At the same time, I know that a lot of people will tell me still, like “Oh, they think about this song sometimes.” And that, like, this, like, song has had an actual emotional impact on people. And I guess, like, sort of as an artist, you might not be able to control- or be satisfied with how you feel about one of your works, but it’s important to recognize that those feelings are valid to feel, but also try to take some joy in remembering that there’s probably someone out there who’s going to connect with it in a way that even you might not.AOIFE:
I think that’s an important thing to realize with art, is that people can take away things that you never would have intended them to take away from the work, and that’s not a bad thing, it’s a wonderful thing, about how you can make things that make people feel all of these emotions.BIRD:
Mhmm. Definitely.AOIFE:
With this song… I know you’ve said that it’s “not very good”, although I would beg to differ, do you have a favorite part of this song?BIRD:
I think that there’s sort of a simplicity to the song writing that I think I should maybe try to look back to as I continue to make music, because sometimes the simplest answer is to, like, a question of how do you get something across in music, I think that, like, the build up to the second chorus, pretty much maximizes all of the material that I had available to myself at that point. And I think that just sort of the general writing of that build was something that I could say I… you know, might want to take with me going on.[The build up to the second chorus of ‘godspeed’ plays and fades out]
AOIFE:
One question that we ask in every episode is, what do you think is the most underrated garages song? What is a song that you think could deserve a little bit more attention?BIRD:
Yeah, I definitely- I think that, um, especially in recent memory, just because I think the siesta has had a certain effect on the garages output and also interest for the garages output, I think that on ‘ROSTER’, ‘pony on the go’ was a really, really, really good song… And just because of the nature of being in the big siesta right now, it might not have gotten the attention that it really deserved.[The chorus of ‘pony on the go’ off of ‘ROSTER’ plays, and then fades out]
AOIFE:
Yeah, I- I definitely agree! It’s a fantastic song! Shout out to Quinne, you’re amazing! You do good work!AOIFE:
Thank you so much for joining us on idol board, a podcast where we interview members of the garages, an anarcho-syndicalist blaseball band, from the fictional location of Seattle. We make songs about being gay, the apocalypse, and fighting the gods. And you can find our music at blandcamp.com, with an L, spotify, or on youtube. We’ll see you next week! Now, here’s ‘godspeed’ by bird of the garages.[‘godspeed’ plays in its entirety]
ANNOUNCER:
idol board is edited by Ada Quinn, BONES, Jennifer Cat, Nerdy Sims, and zach.ry, hosted by Aoife, produced by Tangereen Velveteen, transcribed by SigilCrafter Aya and Merry, and written by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen.[outro music plays]