Camelton: The Farewell Tour

Dear friends, 

The Hard Taco song for September, “Lookupable,” is based on my recent browser search history. Every time a random thought or conversation sent me to Google, I put it into the song. As supplementary reading, the appendix at the bottom of this digest contains the answers to all of the questions posed in the song. 

 

Nearly six years ago, we started working on Camelton, the heart-winning and award-warming spoofs of Hamilton songs. I've heard that many of your children grew up with these songs, laughing and molting along with Salamander Camelton, Aaron Bird, George Waspington, The Skylark Sisters, and the rest of their zoological pals.

But when Lin-Manuel Miranda started writing music for Pixar, the global obsession with Hamilton parodies began to wane. By 2021, your children were all clamoring for an Encanto spoof about all my favorite board games, “We Don’t Talk About Uno.” (Confession: nobody was clamoring for this, but if a single person actually asked me to do this, I probably would.) 

But the Camelton playlist felt incomplete. There were too many loose ends! I needed to strut back into octagon one last time and try to give these characters some closure. It was time to launch the flagship of the Camelton flotilla, Naan-Stop. 

We ran into every possible hiccup along the way… blackouts, lost mic cables, cast members losing their mojo, and unexpected controversy about the lyrics (are we allowed to call it Chicken Kiev now, or is it Chicken Kyiv?) But after about a year, it finally came together, and I'm proud to say this is the the longest, funniest, and most appetite-whetting Camelton song in the series:

https://youtu.be/NSMg-OPPSCE

 

I want to express my sincerest gratitude to all of the singers who have given life to all of this nonsense over the years. This has been so much fun, and I am incredibly grateful to be done with it forever now! 

 

With warmest regards,  

Zach

 

Appendix 1: Answers to all of the questions posed in “Lookupable.”

• Both imposter and impostor are correct spellings.

• Gose, the beer, is pronounced goze in the U.S. and goze-uh in Germany.

• The average gas price in Michigan today is $3.83/gallon.

• It isn’t dangerous for dogs to eat grass, but it can be a sign of anxiety.

• The song uses sampled drums, not a real drum set. 

• Jell-o is kosher and considered pareve (not dairy or meat), even though gelatin is made from an animal product. I’m guessing that the rabbi who made that decision was under the thumb of BIG COLLAGEN.

• Stevie Nicks read a cheap paperback book about a girl who was possessed by a Welsh goddess named Rhiannon. She thought the name was cool, and wanted to include it in a song. 

• Sunset tonight is at 8:09 pm.

• Patrick Stewart played Prospero in the 2006 touring company of The Tempest that came to Ann Arbor in 2006.

• Ross Perot died of leukemia.

Fortress Party 2016 Retrospective, Part 3: Camelton

In 2016, everyone in Ann Arbor between the age of 5 and 65 was obsessed with the soundtrack to Hamilton. So we punned the living heck out of it and came up with these videos.

The videos were projected onto a sheet. Malcolm solved two of our biggest engineering problems for this room. When you project a movie at a sheet from behind, the image is backwards, which is problematic when there is text on every slide. We also only about 6 feet behind the sheet, so the image was going to be very small. Malcolm suggested that we place the projector right behind the sheet, point it away from the screen, and reflect it off a mirror. Now, the text was all forwards again, and image was twice as big. This kid has a future as a fortress designer.

We built a small theater with two levels of seating. The balcony seats were much fancier than the wooden bench that people in the first row got, but unlike the actual Hamilton, no one paid $500/seat. 

Once I started making pun-dense nonsense parodies, it was hard to stop. Over the next few years, we made three more Camelton videos. Eventually, we ran out of animals that hadn't been used, to we switched to food. And then to celebrities. 

The Water of Life

Dear Friends,

If you're considering swearing on stack of graveyards to record one song a month, I recommend against it. Sometimes, I wish I had made a promise that would be easier to keep, like making an annual donation to the Audubon Society, or getting a facial tattoo of every Pink Floyd album cover.

I was at a work event the other night, and a casual acquaintance asked if I was still writing a song every day. I told her no, just one a month. "Are you sure?" she asked, "I was pretty sure it was every day."

It was clear that even when she thought I was 30 times more prolific, it was only barely interesting enough to talk about. Now she couldn't even understand why it was a thing. It's like asking a colleague if he is still doing 120 sit-ups a day, only to learn that his regimen has always been 4 sit-ups a day, but yes, he is sticking with it. On one hand, who gives a crap either way, but on the other hand, if it's only 4, why do you even associate this guy with sit-ups?

I found myself apologizing. "I'm really sorry it's just one a month," I told her, trying to redirect the conversation, "How are your 60 school-aged children?"

So here's the new Hard Taco song for the entire month of July 2019, "Peepholes Are Peepholes." I'm happy with it, but not quite as happy as I would have been with a Dark Side of the Moon forehead tattoo.

Scotch Tasting Notes

We've been on holiday in Scotland since Friday, and the most remarkable thing I've learned so far is how to spell Whisky. It's from the old Scottish tongue for "water of life." In Ireland, they call it whiskey, which is Gaelic for, "We put extra e's in every feckin' word, like feckin' and Gaelic." In the U.S., we also call it whiskey, because the first bottles came across the pond with Irish immigrants during the potatoe famine, which is Gaelic for, "Here we go again with all the feckin' gratuitous e's".

Scotch malt whisky comes from six main regions: Islay, Speyside, Highland, Lowland, Campbelltown, and the other Islands. Here's everything you need to know before you pour your first measure.

Islay:
Most famous distilleries: Laphroaig, Ardbeg, Lagavullin
Islay malts tend to have a peaty flavor. Scotch aficionados use that word a lot, but I wanted to know what it really meant, so I spent my first day on the island licking a peat bog. I would describe it as firm, smoky, dignified, austere, rich, complex, layered, tarry, balanced, youthful, subtle, sweet, succulent, vibrant, soft, thick, creamy, peaty, and difficult to describe.

Speyside
Most famous distilleries: Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, Macallan.
The Speyside region is small but has more distilleries than the rest of Scotland. Speyside whiskies are often described as having hints of grass, hints of oak, hints of pepper, and hints of orange rinds, colostrum, moth wings, Elmer's glue, stage fright, shingles rash, moon craters, and justice. Only an expert-level connoisseur can drink an entire glass of Speyside whisky without asking for any hints.

Highlands
Most famous distilleries: Glenmorangie, Dalmore
Highlanders mistrust outsiders, and insist on using their own adjectives to describe their whisky, such as fleich, daggie, drell, snookit, nump, smeelit, tartan-brighty, plowtery, smirr, speefle, flitters, and watergaw.

Lowlands:
Most famous distilleries: Auchentoshan, Glenkinchie
Lowland whisky creates powerful connections between the olfactory centers and the hippocampus, making it the perfect dram for drumming up repressed memories. A sniff of Auchentoshan, for example, may bring to mind your physically-abusive schoolmarm or your war buddy dying in your arms, while the mouthfeel of Bladnoch is more likely to invoke the time Aggie MacDougal called you a dobber and you pissed your kilt.

Campbelltown
Most famous distilleries: Glengyle, Springbank
Not to be confused with the smash hit show tune with the same name, Campbelltown Scotches are inexpensive and keep well. Many Scots stock their bomb shelters with shelves full of Campbelltown flavors such as vegetarian vegetable, cream of mushroom, tomato, and Chunky old-fashioned vegetable beef.

Island:
Most famous distilleries: Talisker, Jura
The Scotch Whisky Association does not recognize the islands as a separate region, instead considering them to be part of the Highlands. This makes sense, because at one point, the whole landmass of the world was one supercontinent called Pangea, and Scotland was connected to Greenland. The Western Islands will probably be considered a separate whisky region as soon as the Scotch Whisky Association looks at a map that is not 270 million years out of date.

With warmest regards,
Zach

A Thousand Year Retrospective

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for January, "A Better Whatever," tries to capture the hope, insecurity, and spirit of personal growth of the new year. This has been an emotionally difficult year for many of us, punctuated by tragic, high-profile celebrity deaths. In fact, the last thousand years have been tough in that regard. Let's take a moment to remember...

Those We Lost in 1016:

• Ætheired the Unready. A whole generation remembers where they were when this quirky despot ordered the ill-advised St. Brice's Day Massacre.
• King Edmund Ironside. Best known for resisting the first invasion of Cnut the Great, Edmund dedicated his later years to social concerns, such as advocating for primae noctis. 
• Badis ibn Mansur. Yes, he was the third ruler of the Zirid dynasty, but those close to him remember him as the guy who loved his camels and oversaw the completion of the largest bazaar in Algiers. 

Speaking of camels, I believe many of you have had an opportunity to see Camelton, a three-song Hamilton parody that I recently posted on YouTube.




I know that throwing my hat onto the crowded hat rack of Hamilton parodies is a brazen move. I am not blind to the fact that every major late night show, YouTube star, and crappy a cappella group has already recorded a Hamilton parody. There are dozens about Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Luke Skywalker, and at least one for every Jewish holiday. (You know that Jewish stereotype that we love writing song parodies? It's totally true. In many communities, it's a compulsory part of Bar Mitzvah prep.)

On top of all that, Hamilton author Lin-Manuel Miranda has written parodies of his own songs. That's awesome in the same way as Vincent Van Gogh using his first self-portrait as the model for his second self-portrait, ending up with this:

If you're a Hamilton fan, I guarantee that you will enjoy Camelton more than the any of those other offerings, because frankly, it is not about anything. It's simply an homage to the greatness of the original songs, paired with pictures of every animal on Earth. I also feel compelled to advertise that the flipping mayor of Ann Arbor plays the role of Aaron Bird. Ohio State beat us in football this year, but we will not concede they are the better program until the mayor of Columbus coughs up us his Hamilton parody.

Shortly after releasing Camelton, I also posted a playlist of 11 original Oompa Loompa song parodies.

As of this morning, each of the Camelton videos has more than 2500 YouTube views, while the Oompa Loompa videos average 1 view each, and that was me testing them.

I'm not the least bit disappointed, though. I know how these things work. There will be a resurgence of interest in these Oompa Loompa videos, along with anything else Gene Wilder-related, in late 3016. That, of course, is when someone publishes the next 1000-year retrospective of celebrity deaths.

With warmest regards,
Zach