Today’s piece, “Drink the Rum,” is a track with an unusual provenance. Dr. Wife and I were on a tour in Belize City on Wednesday, 15 July 2026. The tour guide, Omar, took out a bent cheese grater and a spoon to demonstrate how Belizeans make music out of anything. He played a rhythm on his grater and sang “Drink the rum!”

I coaxed my usually reserved wife to sing “Drink the rum/doot-doo-da-doo-doo” into my iPhone SE’s Voice Memo app. I then recorded a harmony in a separate file. When we got back home, I mixed our vocals together in Audacity and added some effects.

I then added melodica, electric bass, and two alto saxophone parts. I recorded the melodica and sax parts directly into my Blue Yeti Nano mic. For the electric bass, I used a 1/4″ to 1/8″ cable and plugged it directly into my computer’s microphone jack (gulp!).

The result is a weird, wild, whimsical, hypnotic experience, with lots of nasty intonation and wrong notes. The piece is in concert F# major (thanks, babe).

All images in the video come from our tour of a rum distillery, except for the cover art (first “slide”). That is a screenshot of the “rum” resource from the 1994 classic Sid Meier’s Colonization. I pasted it into MS Paint Classic and made my typical title card/song cover image from there.

Please note that I do not condone excessive consumption of alcoholic; please, do not drink the rum; if you must, do so responsibly. If you struggle with alcoholism, please contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA’s) hotline at 1-800-662-4357 or visit https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/helplines/national-helpline. This piece is meant to be a whimsical audio experiment, not an endorsement of a hedonistic lifestyle and/or substance abuse. Jesus Christ Is King, not the bottom of a bottle.

All that moralizing aside, onto the song!

What did you think of this unusual piece? Does it capture the chaotic spirit of rum-ridden Belizean nights?

Happy Listening!

—TPP