Pet Pixels

There are all kinds of dependencies in life. Us software developers have a few extras that “regular” people don’t, specifically software dependencies.

I was reviewing talk proposals for ConFoo and ran into this video by Darcy Clarke, which covers the terrifying differences in dependency resolution between Javascript package managers. This gave me the initial idea for the song, in particular the line “All of my friends bring all of their friends and all of yours bring theirs too“. Inspiration comes from the oddest places, and Darcy might be a bit surprised by this!

Of course we also have the same dependencies as everyone else – friends, family, lovers, colleagues, medications, recreational habits (chemical or otherwise), income, a civilised society, a functioning economy, breathable air, and so on. This song is mostly about the software thing, but the other stuff can’t help leaking in, as reality is wont to do.

In software, a sometimes tricky thing to deal with is a circular dependency, where something depends on something else, that depends back on the thing you started with, and it all gets stuck going in circles. However, in a non-software context, you might actually like the idea of a mutual, trusting dependency.

I did write a verse that made a play on dependency injection, but I couldn’t find anywhere to stick it in.

This is probably the quickest I’ve written a song, taking just a couple of days to get the bulk of it in shape, and to remind myself of how to play my guitar, but it’s a relatively big mix (for me), with more vocals than usual, which took a while to nail down.

I decided to forego my favoured synthetic vocalist for the main vocals (though I’m still using it for backing), and have a crack at singing it myself, which not I’ve dared do since Tailwind, but it came out OK, partly thanks to the wonders of Logic’s Flex Pitch editor. Right from the start, and obvious from the lyrics, this song was intended to be a duet, so I enlisted the help of a friend’s daughter who happens to like singing – thank you Greta! Greta had never done any proper recording before, and learned some mic technique, the joys of loop recording, comping, and using the pitch editor to try out harmonies.

As in my previous song, Uncomfortable, I gave Logic’s virtual players a workout, playing drums, bass, and a couple of keyboard parts. I played the guitar parts, apart from the epic lead solo, which was played by Wassim Rahmani from Fiverr, who also played on Uncomfortable. I also used Claude again to help out with chord progressions; I would never have guessed at using Em like that, nor the final, dangling Am7(9).

Amongst all this, Claude created the first musical hallucination I’ve seen from an LLM; I asked it to draw a chord box for the E7 chord, and it generated this:

While beautifully symmetrical, this is not an E7 chord, or (apparently) any other chord (try playing it, in either of the two interpretations of this diagram; they both sound horrible!), and nor does my guitar have 7 strings. It also stated that the “o” above the box indicates that these strings should not be played; that’s not correct – the “o” denotes an open, unfretted string; an unplayed string is usually denoted using an “x”. It also provided a text description of how to play the chord, but this had no correlation with the diagram, and was also completely wrong. Further evidence that AI is not about to conquer the universe.

The instruments are Logic’s “Smash” drum kit, Logic’s “Rock” modelled bass, a sampled marimba, an analogue synth patch in “RetroSyn”, and “Disco Strings” from the Studio Strings instrument. Logic’s built-in instruments are really good.

[Verse]
There’s too many things
that I don’t control;
I really don’t know which way to turn.
Got an overwhelming urge
to get rid of it all;
have the feeling I might crash and burn

[Verse]
I asked my friend for advice,
she said
“Well, it depends.
Do you really want to go that way?
I don’t think you’ll like how it ends”

[Chorus]
So many things
that depend on me
so many that depend on you
If we get it all together
we can cut them down,
until it’s just me and you

They say to never trust a stranger,
yet here we all are,
handing over keys to the kingdom.
Do we really need to go that far?

[Verse]
All of my friends bring
all of their friends
and all of yours bring theirs too.
(there’s just too many people here)
They’re in such a mess
that nobody’s sure
exactly what they’re meant to do

[Break]

[Chorus]
So many things
that depend on me
so many that depend on you
If we get it all together
we can cut them down,
until it’s just me and you

They say to never trust a stranger,
yet here we all are,
handing over keys to the kingdom.
Do we really want to go that far?

[Outro]
So many things
that depend on me
so many that depend on you
When all I want is
a circular dependency
with you

As always, I really appreciate reposts of links to my songs on here or on BandCamp.