Friday, August 29, 2014

Workout Music for Emotional Problems

If there's one thing The Brown Christmas consistently does, it's coming up with ideas for projects that, for one reason or another, never come to fruition. Every so often however, remnants of these aborted ideas appear on albums. Here is an example from Beast Friends Forever.


The track Workout Music for Emotional Problems, comes from a jam session sometime in the spring or early summer of 2010. The improvisations of this session began taking on an upbeat, energetic, and slightly danceable tone. There was then a humorous realization that we were recording workout music, or at least some bizarre bastardization of workout music.

It was proposed that we continue with this theme, and compile all these tracks into an album. Perhaps something like Sweatin' with The Brown Christmas. We came up with unusual names of exercises, like the lower neck workout. There was also even the idea of either recoding video of fake exercises to accompany the songs, or reediting found exercise video footage and releasing the songs this way.

However because our editing and releasing of music was so far behind, this concept was put on hold. By the time we had caught up and could have potentially released this, the music was already four years old. Much of it didn't age very well; the content and quality of most of the recordings was not of a caliber we felt comfortable releasing at that point. The one gem that existed however was Workout Music for Emotional Problems, and so it found its place on Beast Friends Forever.