Remembering My Forgettable Music Career #1: "Dead Frog"

(I plan to make "Remembering My Forgettable Music Career" a regular feature on Scrambies. In this recurring "column," I will reflect on every song I have ever written, one at a time. When possible, I will provide an MP3 of the song for free download and a colored-pencil illustration.)

Dead Frog (April 1994)

Music by Josh Tinley and Liquid Diet
Lyrics by Josh Tinley
First performed by Liquid Diet, July 1994
Released on Drywall's Feege Against the Machine, August 1995

Liquid Diet was:

Josh Tinley: Vocals, bass
Brian Fuzzell: Drums
Tim Gober: Guitar

Free download: Dead Frog (MP3)

"Dead Frog" was the first rock song I ever wrote, and by most accounts was one of the worst. After ten years of piano lessons, I had become schooled in music theory and had decided that I wasn't interested in writing music in major keys. I thus set out to write a song that was partially in a minor key and partially in no key at all. And I didn't bother to pay attention to any of the music I was listening to at the time to figure out how a rock song might be structured. I sought originality; unfortunately, I think I found what I was looking for.

In April 1994 I was all about teen angst. Academically, the second semester of my junior year of high school was my worst to date. I had decided that high school was spoon-feeding me meaningless crap and not teaching me to think, so I stopped trying. I had determined that my peers were mindless products of popular culture, that they had so sacrificed their human capacities to think and feel that they might as well have been frogs. Kurt Cobain had offed himself earlier that month ("now the music's dead"), and the depression and occasional thoughts of suicide I had been experiencing seemed suddenly glamorous. ("When will I find out what it means to die?") I reasoned that if I were to become like my classmates—if I were to become just another frog—then I need not go on living. I would be a "dead frog." (I no longer feel such animosity toward my peers or even my former classmates. While I still have reservations about popular culture, the "dead frog" thing was a phase.)

"Dead Frog" was about angst, about frustration, about suicide. It was a sermon of judgment and condemnation preached to my peers ("You don't know what it means; you don't know how to think; you don't know if it's real; you don't know how to feel"), while at the same time being a desperate plea asking them for help. (Looking back, it was also a pretty mediocre song.)