POWER OF DIAL-A-SONG

Power of Dial-A-Song is a 1994 bootlegs compilation recorded off Dial-A-Song. I can't hope to comment on all of it, so I'm going to write this while listening to it and comment on anything that stands out to me.

Obviously, the fidelity is awful. It's quite literally a recording of a phone call. As has been established, we're a sucker for low fidelity, so we aren't too bothered by it. There's a whiny, screechy quality to all the synths as relayed over the phone. I consider this to be part of the text, and it's part of why Dial-A-Song is a testbed in this era of TMBG as opposed to the full studio recordings that would come in the 2015 and 2018 iterations. The tech simply wasn't there yet, and that was the point.

The manic creative output is very obvious here; it's reflective of the later points made with Apophenia and I've Been Seeing Things on later Dial-A-Song compilations from 2015 and 2018, respectively. To attempt to glean a thematic read from Dial-A-Song is a useless effort, except to comment on the flooding of it all.

Cupid is great, it feels like a sequel (prequel?) to You'll Miss Me, at least the version on the 1985 tape and not the one later. A lot of these tracks feel like they're riffing on the same themes as later work, just... different. In this way, I posit that these aren't really unreleased tracks per sé, just massively different versions of what we've come to know. This is also reflected in how short and manic these tracks are: they were never meant to be released, they were meant to be an exercise to help TMBG do their creative output.

We write a lot of short stories and poems that we show nobody. The purpose of these is not to have "unreleased creative material", they're to warm up. Dial-A-Song is kind of like that, if we were to show all that work to other people. The idea of exposing your creative process naked like that is really admirable.

Brainwashing Our Fighting Boys (so they won't fight anymore) certainly is reflective of the themes of Pink Album. The idea of brainwashing someone to not fight is the opposite of what happens, so that's kind of the crux of it. Don't have much else to say about that.

I adore We Love All The People; not much to say about it. It got re-recorded as Rock Club for the TMBG podcast at one point.

The versions of released tracks on Dial-A-Song are strange. O, Do Not Forsake Me loses its bass tonality and "talking like this" bit, because he's not talking like this. Ondine is downright slow and has a really weird bridge. Spy is completely different. I Palindrome I is a completely different song. Ana Ng? Is that you? This goes on — obviously I can't comment on them all.