Alternate Title: Hey Stephen (Teu's Version)
As strange as it might seem that someone best known for odd time signatures, prog covers, and all-around music nerdery would end up covering a songwriter who is physically incapable of chromaticism*, a melody's a melody-no matter how small-, and Swift excels at catchy melodic writing at a level few other pop stars have risen to. After entering a quasi-Swiftie phase just after the pandemic (I agreed to listen to her entire discography in exchange for my friend putting himself through all of King Crimson's oeuvre; I'll leave it to the comments to decide who walked out with the better deal), my idle thoughts soon pivoted towards how to demonstrate my newfound fandom through music. Working through a number of possible arrangements, mostly centered around Fearless, Swift's sophomore outing, I eventually settled on what I thought was a winning concept: setting 'Hey Stephen', a relatively tame work of straight country pop, to a futuristic techno-swing beat, drawing out its hooks while shedding anything that could make it lose chiptune scene clout.
There's a great deal of danger in the too-good cover idea. It is said that Alfred Hitchcock dreaded the writing and filming process-with the movie already complete in his head before setting down before his typewriter, the task of converting concept to script to scene felt more like dull transcription than lively production. An arrangement with too much flow runs the constant risk of undermining its own intrinsic motivation-why waste your valuable time on Earth sitting in front of FL Studio when you could replay your imaginary cover right that very moment? The cover idea stayed an idea for many years.
2023, however, became a year of great upheaval in my life. With the move to a new college came a new social scene to integrate myself into (as best as I can, at least-I'm no networker). As the campus's thus-far only chiptune musician, I had a built-in way to sell myself-a man dancing to '8-bit' metal/R&B after a succession of guitar acts stands out almost by default. My first trip to open mic night, while successful, would be my last for several weeks as I searched for modules that could top my initial effort, to no avail. The answer to this performance funk wouldn't arrive until the end of September, when a poster outside my dorm announced a new event themed around a certain wildly-famous pop artist-suddenly, that hitherto-unnecessary cover idea had a reason to be.
What you're hearing while reading this is, barring a few minor phrasing edits, identical to what that auditorium packed full of Swifties heard that Monday. I finished the cover in a 3-and-a-half-day rush, with the finishing touches coming a mere handful of hours before performance night. The structure itself leaves relatively little to the imagination-start small in the verses, get big in the choruses, keep building on the macro scale-, but hopefully the execution itself has enough raw zazz to keep it fresh. Although I mentally flirted with stereo and other tricks to help the track keep up with its modern peers, deadlines meant that none of this came to fruition. Like all too many of my tracks, the video for this song took several times longer than the song itself.
The actual show went over about as well as I hoped it would. My bizarre flailing on stage lent the song a degree of proper nerd cred, while my pre-song remarks effectively turned the track into an instrumental for a chorus of fans who knew the lyrics scarily well (If you're wondering how well this outside-demographic cover did at expanding my social circle, just about everyone had left by the time I had said goodbye to the other performers-such is life). If anyone from that day happens upon this video, I can't thank you enough for appreciate the work of a fellow fan.
*This isn't me being funny-every TayTune that moves outside its scale has a co-writer credit (no, really!).
Module File: drive.google.com/file/d/11auny7iD2irdYRZnJfCNfQuufe2i4-xp/view?usp=sharing