Resurrecting Punk Rebel Renegade, Pt. 3

resurrectingprrIf you wanted me to lazily continue from the last installment, sorry. I’m going to talk about copyright stuff.

Let me start by saying I’m totally cool with how this works. I’m not going to fight it. I’m not going to even complain about it. But there are 2 songs on Punk Rebel Renegade that feature some copyrighted content. I mentioned them before, but one was a quick little vocal rendition of Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize.” And the other one was a near identical ripoff of the first verse or two from Nine Inch Nails’ “Somewhat Damaged.”

For the former, I chose to get some official word about the legality of using it. To make a long story short, I’m electing to exclude that part from my song. It’s unlikely Quiet Riot or their representatives would care, but I don’t want to take any chances and get the album pulled from all the online marketplaces. My contacts advised me of that. It’s this 30 second pseudo-skit that serves as an intro to “XXX 666.” It upsets me a little bit to have to take it out, but I have to. Throughout the album, there are these quick little vocal discussions with myself, and this was probably the best one. Well, it’s the funniest at least.

For the Nine Inch Nails-laden song lyrics, I know that’s not kosher to sort of cover, so I didn’t even ask anyone about the legality of it. As I mentioned before, the song is too long anyway, so it’ll benefit from being cut down by a minute or two. It’s nice to have concrete reasons to edit these old songs. It makes me feel better to fix them up for a reason like going to court or whatever instead of doing it just to do it. I sort of remember recording “Pretty Little Ditty,” the song with the NIN lyrics in it. I feel like I had the drum part in place, and then I sort of jammed on my guitar on top of that. Eventually this chord progression came together, and it reminded me of “Somewhat Damaged.” So as as joke to myself, I guess, I sang the lyrics right then and there. I suppose it was one of those “you had to be there” moments, because it was hilarious to me at the time. But maybe I was just super tired at the time, when everything was funny.

Looking at it another way, having to take out moments like these will just make the Punk Rebel Renegade Retrospective all the more interesting. I’ll include the uncut/unmastered streaming versions of those songs here on the site to exhibit what the world had to miss out on. I mean, it’s obviously just a marketing ploy. That’s why I’m making a big deal about having to get rid of these vocal parts in my songs! Not really.

Regardless of how satisfied I am with any of the songs, I don’t really want to make any dramatic changes to them. Sead has listened to a few of the premastered Punk Rebel Renegade songs, and he told me one of the songs kind of drags in the middle. It was definitely a valid critique, and if it wasn’t for me wanting to keep these songs mostly the same as they existed 5 years ago, I would easily cut that middle part out. I’m still undecided on how I’m going to handle it because that song is one of my favorites on the album, it’s one of the poppier tunes on the album, so I feel like I should make it as concise and on-point as possible without totally redoing the song.

So yeah. The beginning of the official version of “XXX 666” won’t be as funny as I wanted it to be, but you’ll be able to hear it on this site eventually. And “Pretty Little Ditty” will be at least a minute shorter. And I think that’s probably the weakest song on the album, so making it shorter isn’t a bad thing. Plus, I don’t think the inclusion of the Nine Inch Nails lyrics made the song any more enjoyable, so it’s all good.

Next time, I’ll resume from where I left off with Resurrecting Punk Rebel Renegade, Pt. 2. Also, I’ll probably have concrete updates about how I exactly dealt with the possibly-copyright-infringing material.

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