Shovel Knight/Megaman 5 - Strike the Earth/Venus remix - "Digging into Memories"
11Arrangement, production by Jorito.
Vocals by Stephen Kelly.
Lead guitar by Furorezu.
It was my turn for another round in the Robots vs. Knights compo (http://ocremix.org/community/topic/44082-robots-vs-knights/) and I wanted to do a chill, laid back track this time. I was playing around with some 7 chord progressions a bit earlier, wondered if it’d work for a remix, and it did. Due to my sound selection (e-piano, muted guitar, pads and funky drums) it somehow reminded me of Daft Punk’s track "Giorgio", with Giorgio Moroder recounting history of those early synth days. I figured it could work for my own track pretty well and that having Shovel Knight reflect on his life might be an interesting take.
Originally I started out with vocal clips of Baz Luhrman’s track "Sunscreen" to test the idea, but I quickly reached out to Stephen to see if he’d be interested in giving it a try. He was totally up for it and wrote wrote some tongue-in-cheek lyrics with a lots of puns. Took a bit of playing to get the placement and pacing to work, but since the arrangement already accounted for a monologue it worked rather well.
Somehow this kind of track always makes me want to include a solo guitar part and I was able to wrestle a melody part of Strike the Earth into that role (somewhat; I had to take some liberties). Because it was pretty exposed, my sampled guitar wasn’t up to snuff, so I asked around and found Furorezu willing to play the part for me to bring more of the feelz. Couldn’t fully part with my sampled guitar part though, so I delegated it to play a harmony part and kept it in.
For something that started out as a pretty experimental track I really like how it all came together, and the process itself was as smooth and enjoyable as the final product.
Lyrics:
Let’s call a spade a spade. I’m a success. I read about it in a magazine. I’m popular. I’m captain of the yacht club.
Someone will look at you and they think you’ve always been this storybook champion, this knight in shining armor who can do no wrong. But what they don’t do is they don’t look inside the armor. Because they can’t. That armor is yours.
The world will give you no quarter; they’ll throw everything they have at you and assume it all just bounces off. What they don’t see are the people in your life standing in the way; a shield against the world so you can achieve that one thing you’ve always wanted. The armor is just for show.
Nobody’s an empty suit of armor. Everyone has a past to dig up, but for me that’s always been very personal. Very literal. Like with an actual shovel.