Ten years ago today, I opened an experimental music website called Request-A-Song.com. On the site, my brother Jeremy and I solicited song titles (just titles, not lyrics), which site visitors would submit via a web form. We’d pick the ones we found most inspiring and write songs based on them, then publish them on the site in MP3 format. The project lasted until December 2005.

As you might expect, a lot of very interesting and unusual songs came out of the process. You can tell just by reading the titles of our most popular songs — names like “Butter Ghost,” “Violent House Panda,” “Poke ‘Em In The Neck,” and “I Flipped My Biscuit” — that we preferred ideas on the bizarre end of the spectrum.

In honor of our 10th anniversary, I’ve uploaded all 134 of our songs to The Internet Archive with the hope that it will preserve our effort for posterity.

You can still download those songs from the original Request-A-Song.com website (which also provides information on who requested what and when, lyrics, and dates of release), but it’s actually easier to explore our catalog with the IA’s handy online streaming MP3 app.

(If you want to know which songs to listen to first, here is a list of our 25 most popular songs.)

Over the next month, I plan on uploading more RAS information to the Internet Archive, including news archives, press clippings, song metadata, images, and more.

[ Continue reading Experimental Music Site Request-A-Song.com Turns 10 » ]

I don’t know if anybody out there knows this, but some years ago, I created a music site called Request-A-Song.com (RAS). My brother Jeremy and I wrote original songs based on visitor suggestions, recorded them, and put them up on the site in MP3 format. We usually treated serious requests humorously, and humorous requests seriously, which thoroughly confused everybody (Hence RAS’s amazing success, and why you’ve no doubt heard of it many times). Sadly, our heyday was before the Digg, YouTube, MySpace, and ubiquitous blog explosion, which would have undoubtedly helped us promote our music and unique concept.

I’m only mentioning this now because it deals with something at least slightly on-topic for VC&G — computer history. Mike (aka Dr. Macenstein), over at the Macenstein blog, recently put together a video for my tongue-in-cheek song, “Ellen Feiss Makes Me Hot,” which I released back in 2003 (yes, almost five years ago). It’s about the famous Mac switcher who appeared in an Apple advertisement around the time. Essentially, people thought the commercial was funny because Ms. Feiss looked like she was stoned while filming.

(By the way, I should probably note that I had no idea Ellen Feiss was 15 when I recorded the song. It’s also written from the point of view of a fictional admirer, and acknowledges how Internet obsession can be creepy in the lyrics. I was looking to hitch the song onto a popular meme about Feiss on the Internet at the time.)

[ Continue reading Ellen Feiss Music Video – An Ode to the Mac Switcher » ]