1. Lucid Dream Spell

Prologue: Do Nintendos Dream of 8-Bit Sheep?
This is the only "vocal" track on an otherwise instrumental album. I included this track because I liked the idea of establishing the contents of 8-Bit Town as the dream of a Nintendo. It's like when you beat Mario 2 and realize the whole game was Mario's dream. Unlike in Mario 2, I'm letting you in on the secret at the beginning. So, as you listen, you're in a dream, but you know it's a dream - kind of like in a lucid dream ;-) (I promise that's the only emoticon... I couldn't resist.) 

I wrote these lyrics in the hopes that if I could get this song stuck in my head during my waking hours, it would enter my subconscious and somehow become an activation mechanism in my dreams to make me self-aware (causing lucid dreams). It didn't. Still, I liked the tune and the idea.

I recorded the speech with a program called AnalogX SayIt that allows you to enter the text and frequency (among other settings) of what you'd like it to say. I recorded each syllable separately and then combined the sounds afterwards.

The program had trouble making certain speech sounds, so I had to find ways of getting around its shortcomings. For instance, it couldn't properly pronounce "ong" as in "song" or "belong". "Song" came out sounding like "soyn" or some such bastardization. Through trial and error, I arrived pretty close to an accurate pronunciation of "song" with the spelling "sawnng" (for Ford knows what reason).