Into the Dark (The Mist Cave)

[bnewman]

This is my lyric arrangement of the underground theme from Final Fantasy IV. In the game, the first cave you encounter is the Mist Cave, which is haunted by a Mist Dragon — and the Mist Dragon turns out to have a specific connection to the game's plot, which is not explored in the song. The song represents more of a legend that might have grown around the place, before the events of the game occur.

The chords, based on an analysis of a MIDI file, are as close as I could make them and unfortunately quite difficult to play on the guitar — F#m is, based on a computer search, the least-annoying key, and I still can't pull it off consistently. My recording is a cappella.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
ttto: "Into the Dark" from Final Fantasy IV by Nobuo Uematsu

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A Jedi Knight with a Mean Streak

[bnewman]

I saw Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith in the theater the weekend it came out. It so happened that I also attended a live production of Sweeney Todd that same weekend. The similarities stood out to me, as they so often do, like a bright, hot blade in a dark place: both Sweeney and Vader start out in promising careers in which they owe their success to their skill with a gleaming blade; both are disgraced, transformed by a consuming rage and hatred, and return under a new name seeking vengeance; both murder their wives but blame others for it; and both leave behind children who have to sort it all out.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" from Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim

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The Last Unicron

[bnewman]

This mashup — based on a typo! — of The Last Unicorn (and its theme song) and the Transformers movie may be one of the most 80s things I've ever written.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
ttto: "The Last Unicorn" by America

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Water and Light and Air (A Tree Song)

[bnewman]

Plants of course depend on nutrients in the soil, but the bulk of the matter that makes up a plant, and especially a tree, is just this: water and air, spun together with light.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
after "A Tree Song" by Rudyard Kipling
set to music by Peter Bellamy

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Deep Rock Galactic Song

[bnewman]

Deep Rock Galactic is one of my favorite multiplayer games — a class/squad based co-op miner/shooter with missions just the right size for a casual play session, and a truly friendly online scene. I highly recommend it (unless you balk at enclosed spaces, chasms, darkness, or swarms of creepy crawly things).

Anyway, you play as classic-RPG-trope Dwarves mining a hostile planetoid on behalf of a heartless sci-fi megacorp — or, as the song puts it: Dwarves, workin' for the Man... in spaaaaaace!

Of course I had to write this as a parody of that most famous of Dwarven ballads, from The Hobbit, and it was the animated movie's setting of it that stuck in my head first, but for this I went with the setting from the Peter Jackson film.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Misty Mountains" by Thorin Oakenshield & Co., as recorded by J.R.R. Tolkien

set to music by Plan 9 and David Long

 

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Bowerbird

[bnewman]

A bowerbird's bower may not be as shiny as a bird that is literally on fire, but it's pretty shiny.

Featuring the top of my new filing cabinet on percussion.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Firebird's Child" by S.J. Tucker

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Under the Tree of Life

[bnewman]

Like the "journal bound in leather fine" of the original song, a Torah scroll is also a book bound in skin, with "all the world within", to which those who hold it are bound by the promise of a Power that must not be named. I think we got the better deal, though — the Torah will keep producing new meaning for as many generations as continue to cherish and retell it.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Under the Gripping Beast" by Catherine Faber

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