culture / music

Open Mic Adventures XXXVIII: “Quasi-Date”

The Portly Politico7 Comments

It’s been refreshing to get back out to open mic nights and to do some live performances again.  In the spirit of getting back out and playing again, I’m digging deep into my back catalog and playing some really obscure originals.

My mind is also percolating for the first time in years with ideas for new songs.  Here’s hoping I have some time to sit down at the keyboard and do some actual writing and composing.  Sure, I’ve been composing a great deal of instrumental music lately, mostly for the piano, but I haven’t written a proper song since about 2019.

That said, at last week’s open mic I decided to pull out a really old piece, one I wrote way back in 2010, called “Quasi-Date.”

“Quasi-Date” is one of the first songs I ever wrote.  To clarify, I’ve been composing pieces of instrumental music for years—since about 1998, when I obtained a copy of Cakewalk 3.0 and started composing and arranging instrumental music.  “Songs” are (generally) pieces of music that include vocals; “pieces” are anything else (again, generally).  We often call instrumental works “songs” as a form of linguistic shorthand.  To further confuse matters, we often put “song” in the title of instrumental pieces, such as my piano piece “Spore Song (Mushroom Dance).”

So, while I had written loads of instrumental music—pieces—by 2010, I hadn’t really written many songs.  I had written a few goofy songs for a short-lived group called The Tyler Cook Orchestra whilst in graduate school in 2007, but many of those (including a lustful ode to Natalie Portman, which got my dad mad at me when I played it for him) have fallen into obscurity even for me.  I’m not even sure if I still have the lyrics for tunes like “Robot Woman” and “Viking” and “My Online Girlfriend”—all classics lost to time and space (or, more likely, lost in my desk drawer somewhere).

But I digress.  Other than those 2007 novelty songs, I can’t place my hands on much I’d written before 2010.  “Quasi-Date” came about while I was living in Sumter, South Carolina.  My first serious girlfriend and I had split, and I’d taken a liking to a local journalist (if only I knew then what I know now about the press, those knaves!).  Unfortunately, my competition for her squirrely affections was a very tall (taller than me, and I’m six-feet-ish) attorney.  I was a lowly municipal bureaucrat booking Gallagher to tell raunchy jokes at the City of Sumter’s Opera House.

As is often the case in my early work, romantic misadventures proved to be fertile ground for inspiration.  So it was that I penned “Quasi-Date,” a combination love song and diss track:

Here’s the YouTube version, for those so inclined (like, subscribe, ring the bell, etc., etc.):

The journalist and the attorney ended up shacking up for about a decade and had a kid.  I think he finally married her.  Geeze, dude.  I guess a quasi-date becomes a quasi-family pretty quickly.  Glad they made it official.

Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Editions of Open Mic Adventures:

7 thoughts on “Open Mic Adventures XXXVIII: “Quasi-Date””

  1. An interesting song, mate. Tina really liked it and while it has its merits, I wonder whether you might have packed too much into short sections, like a jack in the box with a faulty lid. Thinking about it though, I guess those parts neatly summed up the situation of the song. Another funky tune. 🙂

    What was going on at the start? Were you trying to get a date with the sound chick? 🙂

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    • We all make mistakes, Ponty. As I have gotten older and write more quickly, I catch myself mixing up your/you’re and there/their/they’re all the time—and I KNOW the difference! You’d think that writing more would improve accuracy, but it seems to be the opposite.

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