We’re the first ones to admit that we have a weird job here on the internet. We make videos to give you permission to laugh and have a little more joy in your day. One of the questions we get most often is “How do you come up with your songs and parodies? Do you get the idea first or the song?” Penn will tell you that 99% of the time we have the idea first, then we pick a song or compose something to match.
In the pandemic, we put out 154 songs and song parodies. Some songs were reactions to things happening in real-time that we published very quickly while the story was still relevant. The rush of a deadline is exciting for Penn’s ADHD brain as well as both of our former news journalist backgrounds. Not only can we pull these songs off because of Penn’s creativity, but because of our rockstar team as well.
Penn Sings The News
Recently, we put out a song parody in response to Taylor Swift showing up to watch Travis Kelce at the Kansas City Chiefs game. It was a rare moment when Penn’s knowledge of both Taylor Swift and professional football collided. The song educated Swifties on who Travis Kelce was, and we kept getting the same comment:
“I wish you guys would sing every news story!”
On this week’s podcast, we explore the idea of how it would sound if Penn sang the news. The news can be tricky – there’s a lot of polarizing and tragic stories. We stayed away from those, but I think you’ll like what we picked. Penn also gave us a behind-the-scenes look at his writing process.
Songwriting Tips
Penn goes through several tips songwriting tips in the show. The most important one being: Start with the hook. The hook can be the melody or a lyric, but it’s that part of the song you remember. He also took away another great tip from watching Lin-Manuel Miranda in the PBS documentary on the musical, Hamilton. In creating the show, it was hard not to include everything. One piece of advice he heard was something to the effect of: A great piece of art doesn’t have everything. Penn says it’s important to pick and choose 1-2 important things and not include it all.
Listen to the three news stories we sing about and tell us what you think. Should we start making this a regular series?
