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Hi folks,

This is a song I wrote online here several years ago with help from JPFers.

Backwards Reverse psychology, sarcasm...things I don't do, usually. This was an experiment in writing from an uncomfortable place.

Synth Pop/Ska, with a "Talking Heads" influence both lyrically and musically. Some lines don't make sense but felt right, in a David Byrne kinda way. This was originally to be sung by a lawyer mom (in a musical), who was ushering her husband and kid out the front door who act like zombies as they leave.

Made back in January of 2023, the visuals are already dated due to how fast Stable Diffusion improves. It goes by the name SDXL now. Fun creating using this AI, but your work is dated by next morning, haha.

The audio is not as clean as I would have liked, due to me speeding up the tempo drastically, then swapping out sped-up cartoonish voices with LALALS ones made perfect sense: a slight loss in audio quality, but no more cartoon voice, at least on the main three vocals.

Thanks, and I apologize for "long winded." I hope you enjoy it.




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Sleepwalk Through Your Life


Sleepwalk through your life
Like one long night
Dazed in super slo' mo'
Swarm like human ants
St. Vitus dance
Through every mall Pro bono

No more highs and lows
No bright clothes
Blend in with the carpet
Plaster on that smile
Clog every aisle
At the supermarket

Sleepwalk through your life
Keep all thought on ice
Drag both feet to school
Gag and groan and drool

Feeling nothing's great
So sedate
Muted celebration
No way to get hurt
C'mon convert
Join the hibernation

Sleepwalk through your life
Keep all thought on ice
Drag both feet to work
Don't jump, don't jive, just jerk
Strap your monkeys on
Flotsam and Jetsam
Earn your undead stripes, yeah
Sleepwalk through your life

And if you should wake up
When your life's nearly over
Try to avoid that
That's one nasty odor

Sleepwalk through your life
Keep all thought on ice
Drag both feet to work
Don't jump, don't jive, just jerk
Strap your monkeys on
Flotsam and Jetsam
Earn your undead stripes, yeah
Sleepwalk through your life

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(C) 2015, 2023 Michael Zaneski

Lol... I just happen to be playing "The Last Of Us II" right now...
I love killing ZoMbieS

I hear some Men At Work influence, takes me back

Backwards psychology, sarcasm.. lol
This is really cool .Both the song and vid kill it in a good way.
I think I missed the whole talking heads era ... Life stepped in .
Man that's deep Mike .

Mike, I like this a lot....really nice feel...synth Pop/Ska....OK...I'll go with that...lol..I just think it's got a nice feel to it...as an old video guy, I love how you actually told a story through the visual and didn't just throw in some Zombs...your cuts mean something...nice work


Steve

I first listened and watched the video, i listened the second time without the video and really enjoyed it. That way i didnt have to talk abojut the video lol

Not crazy about the video, but i like the song, even the vocal works cause of the content...otherwise id of said sing it yourself...

Could be a good novelty song. You write good stuff, not sure why you use all this stuff, id like to hear you and your music together.

Are you a musician?

Interesting stuff, more please...

Enjoyed this a lot. So much so that I have no suggestions to offer AS FD says, the AI vocals are appropriate for the subject. I liked the video too.

How hard is it to make a video like that? I saw your mention of SDXL and looked it up. I'd love to make videos but I find the technology very daunting, even from the point of view of what to choose, never mind actually learning it!

Now that you mention it, yep. Men At Work feel in there for sure.

Never played that vid game, heard it's great. Loved the HBO series; those who came to the HBO after having played the game had mixed reactions, though.

Not a fan of "fast zombies" in general, "28 Days" franchise and "The Last of Us" being the exceptions..

My love is rooted in Romero's vision and how they're a metaphor for consumerism, but I'd add they're a metaphor for living without any drive--not to mention a sense of wonder or purpose, though one could argue a hunger for brains is all those things lol. Then had the opportunity to write it when the (stage) musical idea was bandied about by co-write partners up in Humboldt County.

Thanks for listening. Ha! A most serendipitous...let's just say you were having a serendipity doo dah day, and leave it at that!


Mike

Thanks, Ben.

Yeah, lawyer mom is sarcastically yelling at her husband in the first verse as he and kids leave, then she turns to the audience to take a sleeping pill to go back to bed, and sings the second verse "feeling nothing's great..." and her hypocrisy is pretty funny, there.

But I believed all the understanding and context was lost without the song coming from the staged production. So the song sat around for years. Then several months ago, I looked at the song again and realized there's enough "there" there for the song to work on its own.

David Byrne has always been an influence on me. He could be funky and literate in the most casual way, as well as spouting nonsense that felt deeply meaningful. That's a gift, lol.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Mike

I enjoyed the totality of the artistic expression.
Video has nicely coupled to the music.
Video was a fascination for me.

Marty

Thanks, Steve.

I'm spending a lot of time on video work these days. I had a fascination for creating motion from still photographs and Stable Diffusion was able provide some solutions to that creative problem.

But the motion from frame-to-frame is not smooth, most of the time. The AI does not understand video motion, just single frames, hence the problem when creating animation. However, I realized for Sleepwalk, I could incorporate that lack of smoothness into the video, as if it were intentional, in that I timed the jerkiness to match the tempo. And so the zombies marching across the room in the instrumental section comes across due to simply matching the tempo of the movement with that of the song. Sometimes, my ancient math skills actually come into play LOL.

I'm glad you like it.

Thanks again!


Mike

Haha...more on the way.

Yeah, I am not thrilled about the unsmooth frame-to-frame movement. Trying to connect still images smoothly might be about as impossible as perpetual motion without an energy source.

FD, that IS my vocal performance. All of them in this song are. LALALS is an online service that works differently than Synth V. LALALS simply changes the sound of the voice, the vocal cords, NOT the performance. All the nuances in those vocal performances were exactly as I sang them, albeit sped up (by me), due to needing a faster tempo.

Many of the songs I have written (and sang), I've written with specific "other" voices in mind. They become my muse that gets me to hear how the melody goes, as I'm imagining them singing in my head. So I welcome the opportunity to hear the songs the way I originally intended them to sound, and that's usually...not with my voice, but the voices of the singers I was channeling.

I am just not into singing, myself, for the time being, and am enjoying cloaking my older/prior vocal performances with the timbres of other vocalists and singers.

You know I have been a musician in that you know I sang for a bunch of years. I also was a pretty good acoustic guitarist who can still probably Travis pick pretty well.

So if I modify your question to read "Are you STILL a musician" --that makes more sense to me. I guess not. Writing/composing and producing are pretty much it, these days, and I'm okay with that. That's enough to fill my day up with many hours of fun work.

When I ran a post house in the '90's, and even today there didn't seem to be a connect of vid to lyric and the goal was to see who could get the most cuts in 210 seconds...so it was nice to see what you did

Steve

Not hard per se, but maybe time consuming. I figured on the kinds of shots I wanted then generated the various scenes, many of which also used a pre-existing youtube video from which to work. The instrumental middle walking zombie part, for instance, was originally a short video of regular folks walking across a room. That's exactly what I knew would work, with what I had in mind. Using Google Colab Pro, all the work is done in the cloud so there's no need for a state-of-the-art PC.

So there's:

1) planning stage, blocking out scenes, etc.
2) creating the various scenes using Google Colab Pro
3) Stitching the scenes together in a good movie creation software. I use Adobe After Effects. Doesn't need to be state-of-the-art as you just basically want to join everything together on a timeline, add music, etc.
4) Render out a finished video.

Creating the scenes in Google Colab Pro is easy as pie. I am still using 1.5 as SDXL has no image sequencing or animation features yet. SD 1.5 has Google Colab Notebooks dedicated to Stable Diffusion Automatic1111--that's what I use. Colab Pro costs $$$ but now there's two ways to do that, one is the old fashioned "subscription" method, the other is pay-as-you-go. Both ways can be as inexpensive as ten bucks a month.

Modifying pre-existing footage is the easiest way to make animations, as all you need do is convert the video (to be used) into a sequence of frames, put them into a folder, and then upload the folder into Google Drive. Once they are there, you "point" to their location in Stable Diffusion Automatic1111, and they will get modified according to various choices you make in the Automatic 1111 GUI, most saliently using words describing what is wanted, and writing those words in the appropriate box in the Automatic1111 GUI--inside of the "prompts" box. It's not as daunting as it might seem at first glance.

About the singing. As I explained to FD, those are all my performances, as all LALALS does is change the sound of the voice. It doesn't change the performance. So if you have a big Anthony Newley vibrato going in, and you choose "Bob Marley" --you will wind up with a file with a singer that sounds like Bob Marley, only with a big Anthony Newley vibrato. This tool works quite nicely with ones own voice, and also with the synthetic AI voices that are now available, like the ones for Synthesizer V.

Thanks Gavin, glad you enjoyed it.


Mike

I can barely make it to Starbucks at 5am , without tripping
So I'll let pros make vids
More power to ya Mike.
I've noticed a lot of Nashville vids, are a picture with lyrics scrolling by.
Its probably all you need , It basically comes down to, how good the song is .
For obvious reasons , the vids with artists singing are better. Self promotion and who is this guy ?

Thanks, Marty.

I have a decade long fascination with animating still frames, cuz there's inherent problems that STILL have yet to be cracked.

One way to do it is with what's normally used to create slow-motion video, and that's what's called "frame interpolation" which is like it sounds: put a series of "in-between" frames, in between every two original frames. That's mostly what's going on in my video.

It's not true animation, but that doesn't mean it can't be interesting to look at. I found that using it in songs can be aided by simply making the interpolation "groove" at the same tempo as the music.

Glad you enjoyed it and glad you listened. Thanks again.


Mike

Michael,

Were you under any influences when this was created? The video really is cool with the lyrics--makes it fun for sure. I hear 80's here for sure--well done!

steady-eddie

H
Hi Eddie,

Influences? Talking Heads, Randy Newman, Eighties New Wave, George Romero, Delta 9 Gummies, not necessarily in that order.

Thanks, Eddie. Yeah, it was a fun project, especially revisiting it with the Eighties voices.

Mike

Enjoy this one! Good job.

Thanks, Carroll. I appreciate that.