Song (well, more of a ditty really): "Muhammad Ali"

This one is for all my under-age-30 buddies trying to find summer jobs. I'm with you!

Um...warning. I did this in a goofy style. I didn't breathe enough. And I was making it up as I went. Eh heh. Yeahhh, it's bad. (Though apparently also funny to some people?)

So, uh, yeah. I'll post the words if anybody wants them buuut I doubt you will. lol

A little bit of photo-stop-animation music video thingamajig, anyone?

Hey, who remembers the "cocaine" project? Nobody? Right. Well! Errr...here it is. Partly. Sort of. So here's a...sort of like a music video, I guess. At some point, I want to finish the rest of the song out properly, since Sia is a wonderful brand of ridiculous and may pimp it in some way, which would be great for my resume. >_> (Edit note 6/1/08: I totally just left a message for her with a link to my blog so she could see the vid if she wanted to and oh crap, that sounded so embarrassing now so I put a strike through it because altogether removing it would make me a coward!)

-- Thanks to Zodi for finding the MonkeyJam program when I panicked about how to pull it all together properly.
-- Uber thanks to Peta and Vicki for staying up late to help me try to finish this at one point. Though I didn't use your words in the end (since I had time to shoot them myself after that), you girls kept me from panicking and giving up. <333
-- Thanks to my baby sister and to the semi-adopted sister Kim for help with writing a few words.
-- Thanks to all y'all who've been listening to me go slightly insane doing this for the last week or two

Materials:
Baking soda, table salt for the fake "cocaine" mixture.
Two nylon paintbrushes and two straight razor blades to move the powder mixture around.
Black boards stolen from a couple of my art storage pockets.
My dear and lovely Casio Exilim digital camera.
PLiska Image Resizer to resize all my photographs to a more manageable size in one big batch.
"The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" by Sia (note: no permission gained)
Audacity to edit the song to a shorter length and to measure the length of each word.
MonkeyJam to piece together some 600 frames in match with the audio track.

(Note: the three above-mentioned programs are all freeware. Try 'em!)

Shifty Lover (mp3)

Sometimes I sing (badly) and record it. In this case, it was partly a character song, but also a general song at all. My character Dreor is complicated and trying to explain how she loves completely but is a difficult lover to have is hard to get across. She's a bit of a mess, but she likes who she is and could never change totally, no matter how being in love might bring out another side of her. But this song also happened because I think love is never perfect, and neither are people. Sometimes love is a different flavor than that romanticized and fairy-taled style we so often believe until we get a taste of reality.

This is NOT my typical or preferred style for singing, but since folks were sleeping in the house at the time, I had to keep it down and sing almost under my breath. I wanted to get it down before I forgot the melody (I can't read/write music). Er, so here it is. Sorry 'bout the awful sound quality and the weird clicks.

Lyrics:
Let me love you
And adore you
But don't let me get too near
I can kiss like
Sun and honey
But my mood may disappear
You've been nothing
But understanding
You've adapted and let go
You've weathered rages with such patience
So surely you cannot be thrown

Sometimes I scream away the mornin'
Sometimes I tear the day apart
Sometimes I just don't wanna love you
But that doesn't stop my heart

I'll do tender
I'll do sweetly
Until I change my mind again
You can hold me
You control me
Until I start craving some sin
It's not like you
Didn't know this
It's not like you couldn't see
When I whisper my "I love you"s
Remember it's not always me

Sometimes I scream away the mornin'
Sometimes I tear the day apart
Sometimes I just don't wanna love you
But that doesn't stop my heart

Sometimes I scream away the evening
Sometimes I tear our world apart

Sometimes I refuse to be gentle
Sometimes I get a little mean
Sometimes I act so wildchild
But you're the quiet inside me

Let me love you
I adore you
But don't let me get too near
And if I claim that I don't love you
Just pretend you didn't hear