As many of you know I worked on season 2 of “Legend of Neil“, a raunchy web-series spoof of the “Legend of Zelda” video game. Doing the sound design and mix for the later episodes from that season was a lot of fun, but I also got to dip my toe into the musical side of things from time to time. It all started when they needed to record some of the vocals for their musical episode. It was great to see the cast members come through and do their thing. They each jumped right into their performance to channel their character’s persona. Many of them weren’t trained singers, but they were all uniformly fearless in owning their parts. Because of the schedule, and the need to bring in each actor in a one-off session, it was really difficult to understand the continuity of the episode – but once it aired it all jelled and I was blown away.
The other brush with musical creativity came when they needed a song for a montage sequence in the next episode, Gettin’ High in Hyrule. Neil wanders into a Moblin bar and has to improvise and play himself off as one of them in order to survive. It’s a great send-up of “Cheers” as well as an homage to the classic buddy-movie-drinking-montage. They needed an 80′s-styled rock tune to go along with the scene, and I obliged. Sandeep and Tony wrote the lyrics and sang the vocals here in my studio. (You may see some footage from that an other episodes on the Season 2 DVD) To add to the mystique, Sandeep was a bit under the weather, which added a bit of gravel to his voice – something that happened to work in his favor. He traded lines with Tony through the verse and all three of us put together the stacked vocals in the chorus. We only did enough of the song to thread through the scene, but it was a blast all the same. The track ‘channeled’ a bit of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” with just a bit of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”. My guess is you won’t hear a significant homage to either track in there, but it was fun to borrow elements from both songs – and screw them up on purpose in the name of comedy.
So now that Legend of Neil Season 3 is about to take flight (the first episode premiers July 26) I’ve relinquished my role and am just another fan among the throngs that follow this series. If you haven’t checked it out, you should catch up on seasons 1 and 2 and watch this season as they roll out. If history is any indicator, it’s going to be a blast.
