My Three Biggest Influences (And Other Useful Notes)

They Might Be Giants:

They Might Be Giants hold a special honor for me because they allow me to put on my rose-tinted nostalgia goggles for two separate instances.  The first of which was my own childhood and the second of which was when I was beginning my teenage years.  They relate to the first due to the fact that they were on various children's cartoons back in the day, such as KaBlam! and Tiny Toons Adventures, programs that everyone loved to watch before Nickelodean started rerunning everything.

They relate to the second part because that was around the time that I really found out about the Internet and about things like Youtube.  Ah, I remember those days, when Youtube didn't have ads being played before every major video and the big Internet meme of the time was a big guy lip syncing to a Molodovan pop group while recording it with his web camera.  Back then, I would watch They Might Be Giants videos on Youtube, when it was young and relatively innocent.

Actually, let me show this KaBlam! video just to illustrate the point:

What I love so much about their songs is how much subtext there is in the lyrics. Just hearing/reading the actual text might make no sense at first, what with worms wanting to be drummers and experimental films, but the subtext of the songs show other meanings, such as how the story of Dr. Worm can be seen as an analogy for striving towards your dreams.  Speaking of dreams, that leads me into my next influence:

Sigur Rós:

This is the band that I could probably use to label myself as a hipster, but I think I might be stretching that a bit.  What I will say is that I love this band's dreamy, atmospheric sound; the sounds of a lullaby.

The one thing that really strikes me about Sigur Rós (despite the fact that it's really hard to type Rós on an English keyboard) is how much they can change their sound while still keeping the same riff and melody.  For example:

For the first four minutes, the song built upon an affinity, which was the dreaming sounding voice and the repetitive guitar riff.  Throughout this half, there are variations on the melody and harmony in order to keep things interesting, but subtle enough not to disturb the overall mood of the piece.  Then, at 4:53, the song changes dynamics, contrasting the quiet, peaceful lullaby with the loud, bombastic, and uplifting choral section in order to really maximize the emotional output of the song.

Being an audio production major, it makes sense that my first two influences were musicians.  But sometimes, we all have a special place in our soul for other things outside our area of study.  Which leads me to:

Monty Python:

Yes, these guys are an influence to everyone, but I find it strange just how much these guys lead me into the media business, which gives me a legitimate excuse to gush on and on about them.  So much of their work has influenced what we see in sketch comedy that we sometimes fail to realize what was so good about their work.  But what's even better is how well the work produced by the Monty Python troupe has stood up to the test of time.  Take the Dirty Fork sketch for example:

What's so good about some of the humor in Monty Python sketches is that consciously some of the sketches make absolutely no sense, but subconsciously we find a new level of humor that doesn't exist when we look at the overall plot, because there is no plot (aside from that one episode about the British cyclist, but that still makes very little sense.)  But when I think about all of these influences, I realize that one of them creates nonsensical music, the other creates music in another language, and the last makes comedy with a very loose sense of logic.  All of these make a very strange combination when looked at together, but they all work together in a strange, complex way.

Now, enough of this silliness, let's move on to something completely different.