New Single from Bad Phantom - BABY TV
The first new single from Bad Phantom in years will have you steeped in futuristic nostalgia!
“Nick showed me this song he’d been working on with this fuzzy guitar sound and a pumping beat and I asked if I could sing on it,” Shayna recalls. “The vocal melody and lyrics came to me pretty quickly. I feel like some of my best ideas come to me when I’m not trying so hard. Nick loved what I wrote, but he was so worried the guitar wasn’t perfect enough. He wanted to redo everything, and I felt like the imperfections is what makes the song. I purposely didn’t use any pitch correction for that same reason. I’m tired of hearing ‘perfect’ music. It’s boring. I find myself searching for live versions of songs I like because the pitch correction just ruins it for me, unless it’s done as an artistic choice, I really wish singers would stop relying on it. I feel like we’re creating this world of perfectionism that isn’t real. We came to the conclusion that the imperfect guitars, the imperfect vocals, the imperfect mixing, was what we wanted to release. I was worried if we tried to make everything perfect it would never be good enough and we would never release it. It was us, and it was the best we did. Our best is good enough. The lyrics are about my personal struggle with phone addiction. I know I’m not the only one, so I hope some people can relate to this imperfect banger.”
“Normally I like writing songs with lots of chords,” Nick explains, “but on this day I just set up a drum machine and played a 3 note bass line on my synth. The bass line is a one note arpeggio, that made it have a pulse like a bass guitar. After that I plugged a guitar into one of my pedals and decided to turn the gain on the pedal up to 100%. Immediately I thought, ‘okay this is loud and crazy!’ I thought it kind of sounded like ‘The Hand That Feeds’ by NiN, but sort of more quirky and silly. Then Shayna added her vocals and I loved what she did right away. We added some claps and tambourine to boost the energy as well. Then I got the idea to add a whip sound to connect with Shayna's lyrics about addiction and being controlled by something else. The original intro to the song was a sample of a Simpsons clip where Bart and Lisa are watching TV and someone unplugs it right before some amazing moment of an Itchy and Scratchy episode and they freak out. Originally I wanted to only use the TV unplugging sound effect but we thought it was really funny to have a whole Simpsons sample as the intro. But then I talked to a guy who knows more about ‘IP’ than we do and he said it wouldn't be a good idea to release a song with a sound clip from the Simpsons. So Shayna and I just did our own parody of the thing from that episode and we hope you enjoy it!”