Hi there

A question I have pondered for a long time....

How do you think of your parodies?  Do you get inspired?  Is it a sudden brainwave that gets you?

Do you think of the title, and then come up with the song around it?

Do you look at titles and see what you can make out of them?

Do you have an idea, subject-wise, and then think of a song to suit?

I am interested to know.

I tend you see what I can do with a title, and then work from there.

What does everyone else do?

It varies - sometimes I have a theme I want to write about, and I go hunting for a song with words to fit ("Coleoptera" is probably the most recent example of that); more often than that, I see a song title and a parody title pops into my head... but probably the most common inspiration comes from listening or singing a song and twisting the occasional lyric - I find that if you can come up with a couple of funny changes without trying too hard, the rest of the song pretty much writes itself.

Some parodies, however, have been hard graft - trying to force inspiration in order to get the thing finished (I sang a parody to "Ruby Tuesday" at my parents' wedding anniversary - that was hard work to finish on time as I threw out the first one I wrote with only a few hours to go)

Phil

I go to malcolm's page and steal 'em.  He never notices.  Seriously, I have a mindless job (letter carrier) so in the morning while I'm casing mail there's usually a classic rock station on. When I hear a song I know well, I play with the title or any memorable lines.  And as I deliver mail all day, people have no idea as I stomp through their flowerbeds that I'm trying to think of a good rhyme for "stinky".  I get paid to do this.

all three...pretty much whatever comes to mind...

I know I had the inspiration for my song, "As queers go bi" after reading Guy's "Hip to be square."  Whereas, the inspiration for "Flood my inbox" came from me wanting to parody "Rock the casbah," and then coming up with a title.  99% of the time, the title is the first thing I think up.  Ive also had a few parodies where I had a concept, and I came up with a song to put it to.

All of the above and a bowl of alphabet soup.  Each one is different.  I don't submit or even bother to jot down all of them I write, but I can give you some examples, from my submissions.  (It won't matter if you don't know them.)  

I'll start with Avril H8er,  the one I have up, today.  A comments exchange between Claude and me, some time back, inspired a mediocre-at-best Avril bashing parody to another tune.  I didn't bother to write that one down and forgot about it.  Then, it started playing itself in my head as I scrolled through the latest comments section, yesterday evening... then, the tune in my head changed to Henry the 8th and I remembered the exchange with Claude that had inspired the bad parody and voila... I had today's submission.  

Stealing Movies which seems to be my one hit wonder came to me as an almost complete parody.  What inspired it requires some lengthy back story.    My husband had been talking about an upcoming Who release.  As I was drifting off to sleep, that night, I was remembering the Who concerts we had attended in the mid to late 90s... and this led to my remembering a laughably obvious and overly paranoid bootlegger, set up behind us on the grass, who was trying to  be non-chalant about what he was doing, but kept getting up and running from security guards who weren't chasing him.  That memory led into the memory of how,  months later, we saw a "pro shot" bootleg video of that show for sale and bought it on the hopes that it would be that video.  It was and it was even funnier than we had imagined it would be!  Pro shot?  The back of my head and the ground whizzing by under this guy's feet have the starring roles -- he never managed to get the stage or monitors in frame.  You can't hear the music, either, instead you hear his breathing, his gym bag scraping against the mic, his muttered urgings for people around him to sit still and be quiet, etc.  Then, for some reason, I pictured him branching out into a career as a movie bootlegger, sitting in a crowded movie theatre trying to be non-chalant and singing, "La la la la stealin' movies!" while getting the same "pro shot" quality he got at the concert.  Imagining the facial reaction of the poor overseas schmuck who'd soon buy a burn on the black market made me laugh aloud and then, all but the last verse wrote itself, in the next moment... it just tumbled into my head as if I was remembering it, more than creating it.  It was the next afternoon before I got a chance to type in what I had, listen to my copy to tighten the pacing and write the last verse.  I thought it was funny, but it's such a simple piece that I didn't think anyone would notice it, much less like it -- boy, was I wrong.  

"Going Down Below" and "Grandpa's a Nutjob" weren't meant to be submissions and, normally, I wouldn't have bothered to jot them down.  They're just me making up stuff on the fly to amuse my kids.  The kids happened to like those two so much they asked me to submit them to see if anyone else would find them funny.  The only change I recall is that I edited "Going Down Below" a little to pace better with Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky"  because I had been singing it with the lesser known Kentucky Headhunters version in mind and I didn't want comments and undeserved docked points from the "originals police."  (That particular title was also chosen to draw in some voters.)   Little Sleazy Ho came about the same way, except I was hoping to make some of the other Amiright authors laugh... my version of returning the favor.  

Searching for Weapons, Addicted to Blood and Living were just writing exercises.  Parts of Searching for Weapons were jokes from something else I'd written, shortly prior... I was going a different direction with the parody and caught myself singing lines from the other piece to the tune I was using.. and I realized they not only fit the scan, they fit the character.        

O Debt was written around the title, a cluster of vague ideas and two lines that had come to me as I was listening to the song, for the sheer pleasure of enjoying it.   "Fail on Failure" came out of the leftover ideas from "O Debt,"  the song choice was partly a matter of indulging myself in that "Sailor on Sailor" is my fave Beach Boys song.  It also had the right mood and a cadence I thought would work with the theme.   It's really funny that it takes so many words to say that -- the thought process behind that decision took barely an instant.  

Mimes (to Signs) came to me, very slowly, in pieces -- one verse or line at a time, out of order and disjointed, over a period of months.   I typed it in when it was finished, edited a couple of weak lines a few times before I was satisfied with them and cut and pasted it into the submission box.  You can either say it took  six or seven months to write or that it took about half an hour.  

Going Out of My Gourd was a weird one -- four different sources of inspiration.  I'd had the word "magnifry" floating around in the back of my head, for awhile, with nowhere to put it.  Then, one night, an unrelated writing project caused me to dream I was a little kid again, popping tar bubbles with a stick on a lazy summer afternoon.  Then, about a week after that, someone (Royce, I think) posted a parody to Lookin' Out My Back Door and the same question that always pops into my head when I hear the original popped into it... "Just exactly what big Illinois excitement would anybody need to rest up from, anyway?" ... a little while later, I don't remember if it was that day or a couple of days later,  I had long been on to other things and BAM... suddenly the word, the dream, the question and years of telling my same old "what we do for fun in the mid wasteland" jokes  had added up to a cast of characters, a setting, a visual image of both and the basic framework for a parody.  From there, it was just a typical writing process.  

Date Weighs a Heap was alphabet soup written around the title.  

Festering to "Yesterday" was inspired by oblique rhyme with the title and my youngest daughter having come to me with a tiny splinter, barely in her skin, telling me it was festering (it wasn't) and asking whether we'd have to take her to the doctor to have her hand cut off.  (?!)  

Breaking Up is Hard on You was written around my hearing someone mention the title "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" and my thinking "Oh yeah?"   I wrote it in about ten minutes and I really hated one line, in particular.  After I edited that one line, another line no longer fit, so I rewrote that one... and  so on, until I'd rewritten every line and changed the title.  I don't remember most of what I edited out, but "Ciao, Toodle-oo, Farewell, Sayonara" was originally "Down, put the gun down, down, come on, come on"  

Many of my ideas have come to me while I´m out jogging with my walkman on. Inspiration seems to grow a bit stronger as I adjust my running pace to let my pulse get in sync with the bpm of a song.

But sometimes it´s just from some song I hear on the radio.

I´m not running for competitive reasons, neither am I the counting-kilometers type of runner who forces himself to do a preset amont of lenght. I´m going with the flow and an approximated time I wanna be out. Music seems to be able to alter that time in the upwards direction if I pick the right cassette for the right day. I can leave home with nothing and come home an hour or two later with three new ideas and an improved physical condition too.  :D

Parodies often first come as ideas for alternative choruses. And as the title often is part of the chorus I guess I primarily should be counted among the title-starters. Alternative titles are not that hard to come up with though, so unless a whole chorus or a whole verse comes pretty quickly, and unless I like the potential of the idea myself, it just becomes a minor note in my sketchbook, which I sometimes/often look into before I go out jogging. I like to think that ideas that I wasn´t fully prepared for and that didn´t quite cut it to the first song I had them for will that way be nurtured by my muse and come back later.

But I have on occasion (lately) written some parodies just for the subject, and hunted down an original song too use. My songs about "42" and "47", posted as submissions 42 and 47 were obviously such parodies and "I don´t wanna be in this temporal cold war" was based on a month long idea about writing a parody about time travelling. (The variations on the chorus is among my best, I like to think, but the verses hardly make sense even for other sf-fans).  :-/

My recent submission "Can´t calm this beaver" was first a loose idea for my still future to be submission #69. So I guess that one falls into this category too, even though it got ejected primaturely.  :-*

God knows what would happen if I ever find a woman who write parodies and clicks the same way. Maybe we could both skip the jogging part to stay indoors and make sweet music all through the day.   :P

//  Peter "Know 1 can hear you dream" Andersson

Usually I come up with something off the title or a specific line in the song (usually the chorus) and build around that.

They're pretty much random :)

I just listen to the voices in my head and tune out the ones that are crap. Especially that Billy Ray Cyrus one, I hate him.


...or maybe I do what's already been mentioned :)

Sometimes I focus in on a particular story on the news and match it up to a particular song.  Sometimes I will be listening to a song on the radio, especially when driving, and hear something just a bit off from what the actual lyrics are and just like that I have an idea.  Or sometime after I hear the song and it is still bouncing around in my head I 'hear' an alternate line or two which is enough to spark a parody.  I also like to do ballads since I am a story teller by nature I will focus in on something in ballad form and then from a parody around it.  

My inspiration for my parodies varies constantly, but I'll give you a few examples:

My most  recent parody, A Three-Hour Tour, came about after hearing "Stairway to Gilligan" by Little Roger and the Goosebumps. I then jokingly came up with a version of Britney Spears's classic, "Cinderella," sung to the tune of "Stairway to Heaven." Then I sang the Gilligan theme lyrics to "Cinderella" and that is where I came up with ATHT.

Rerun's Gone to the Other Side came to me after the death of Fred "Rerun" Berry. I tried to find a song that would suit the topic. It was either to be "Break on Through" or "Riders on the Storm" (I chose "Break on Through").

I was watching a news thing on North Korean refugees when North Korean Refugees came to me.

It's Halloween Now was a response to a parody of "Who Can It Be Now?" called "Freddy vs. Jason." There was a line in the song "This is not Halloween" and I wanted to get back at him with one about Michael Myers.

Britney's Still a Virgin, Little Miss CAN Write Songs, and I Love Britney Spears were responses to other people Britney-bashing parodies.

The Pong Song came to me automatically because I loved Pong so much.

Britney Spears Is A Man was inspired by something Billy Florio said, in response to a typo I made in "I Love Britney Spears." I thought it was so funny, I had to do a parody about it.

So, my parodies pretty much come from everywhere.

Well, lately I haven't been too inspired.... :-/ ::)

But, when I am, I usually try to take a song title and see what I can do with it. Often there will be a song that I really want to do, and I work with it to see what I can come up with. A good example of that was "It's One of tThose Flights" as I really wanted to parody my favorite Partridge Family song! (Pippin will read this and cringe! ;D )

Sometimes the first thought isn't the best, tho.

"Wrong Wrong Car to Tow" originally started off as "Long Long Row to Hoe" but that just wasn't working!

The Flatworm Trilogy was an idea I came up with and I looked for songs to fit it. It spawned "Plana-Planarian," "Tapeworm's in My Liver" and "I Studied a Fluke." I toyed with "Leech Maybe" but since a leech is not technically a flatworm I left that... :P