For the raps I go over to [fellow Picnicface member] Mark Little’s house with my Casio keyboard. We sit in his kitchen and we separately write a verse and put them together. People have been sending lists of things about themselves so we’ve been working that in. Some of them are not about the people at all. We did one about The Wrath of Khan and that doesn’t have anything to do with the person. And that was because I’d already written that song and it was like, “What am I going to do with this? Nothing.” So we wound up changing it a little. We kind of regifted that one.
Basically Mark and I will sit there and he’ll say, “I’m thinking about monsters.” And I’ll write a rap about monsters and he’ll have one already and we’ll put them together. Then we’ll make up the beat and we’ll play it, but it’s got to be simplistic enough because neither of us can play anything complicated. We use Mark’s MacBook for all of that, we film it in iMovie and he edits it. It is really easy. The person’s name alone is usually enough to go on. We think we’re good at taking words and extrapolating puns for that name, things that rhyme or changing one letter and making another word. Even with just a name you can get started.
