15. Curios and Curiouser

Curios And Curiouser:

The opening. Well, what can I say? I enjoyed the chance to read something I wrote, every writer does…but I still can’t hold a candle to Patrick Stewart! He’s still the man!

We included a bunch of the original demos I did for The Nightmare Before Christmas. These were the tunes exactly as I wrote them and played them for Tim and helped start the ball rolling on the production. I had all the instrumental tracks on tape, and with Tim acting as producer in the control room and me performing in the vocal booth, we finished them all in one evening. The reason that “Sally’s Song” has no vocals is because it’s the one song that, for obvious reasons, I could not sing properly, and there was nobody else at that point to do it.  

Soon enough, we would begin replacing all the vocals with permanent vocals as the different performers were cast. The animation could not begin until the final vocal performances were in place, as the animators needed to synchronize all of the characters’ expressions, mouth movements, gestures, everything. It didn’t take much time once everyone who had a singing part was on board… Paul Reubens, Catherine O’Hara, Ken Page, and the great Glenn Shadix.  A small talented group of character singers and myself performed all the background and chorus voices. On the group songs, we would all choose a character and sing those parts, and then we’d all switch characters and voices and sing again and again, until the amount of voices seemed to fit the numbers of characters in a particular scene.

Finally, when it was time for me to go in and re-cut all my Jack Skellington vocals properly in a real studio with better microphones, etc., an odd thing happened. I would perform a number of takes of a particular song at which point Tim would pause and ask to hear a section of the original demo. The engineer would oblige and Tim would listen very carefully. Finally, he’d say, “I still kind of like the demo better.” I’d listen as well and agree. I guess that sometimes a quick first attempt at any performance can’t be topped. So, I kept going and finished all the songs, but quite a few of the original demo vocals made it into Jack’s final finished performances that exist in the soundtrack today.

The oddest thing by far that was uncovered in the dusty back room warehouse boxes was the last of these demos: “This Time.” It’s an odd rock rendition of “Making Christmas.” (It was discovered on a tossed away cassette titled “Making Xmas Goes Electric”).When Richard and Melisa found this and played it for me, I practically fell off my chair. It was truly the weirdest experience. I had absolutely no recollection of writing or recording it. Yet I could hear that it was without a doubt my voice singing. Then slowly a tiny fragment of memory came back. I called Steve Bartek and asked him, and he only vaguely remembered it as well. I can only imagine that it was an idea for marketing or something when the film was being finished and then dropped (along with most of the marketing) as it got closer to its release. At any rate, it’s me singing. It’s maybe Steve playing guitar. And it’s really strange.

Next. I am very pleased to have acquired some of the foreign performances from the different language versions of Nightmare. In particular, the German renditions of “Jack’s Lament” and “Sally’s Song” seem particularly appropriate as both tunes were heavily influenced by Kurt Weill and his Threepenny Opera. In fact, while writing “Sally’s Song,” I really did imagine the voice of Lotte Lenya, the 1920s German Cabaret star who sang on Threepenny…though Catherine O’Hara ultimately did a fantastic job and really made it her own.

The Nightmare demos end with me again reading the closing monologue. I’m still no Stewart!

Next up are the Charlie And The Chocolate Factory demos. Some points of interest:

“Augustus Gloop”: A very early home demo. This was before anything was established, just a very first pass with a smaller group of my voices not yet altered. You can hear a lot of ideas that didn’t make the final song.

“Violet Beauregarde,” “Veruca Salt,” and “Mike Teavee”: These demos are a little later in the process and closer to the ones that became the final songs.

“Veruca Salt (unused Bollywood version—demo)”: This is from when I had the idea that one theme would carry throughout all the kids’ songs. I think this might have actually been the very first song idea I recorded. It’s all just me doing a few silly voices, still not yet electronically altered or bothering to overdub a big gang of voices like I did later…just a first idea for Tim to hear.

After a great amount of searching, we found a bunch of early Corpse Bride demos. The interesting thing here is that “According To Plan” was much longer and had more sections. The really embarrassing thing is that I am doing both male and female voices on this demo. I originally was too embarrassed to include it, but what the hell…here it is. 

The song “Erased,” unfortunately, ended up getting cut before it got recorded. It was a song for Victor to sing incorporating his piano theme as a melody. (Note: There are several more alternate performances of “Erased” on the USB drive as well.)

Finally, here’s another extreme embarrassment, “The Wedding Song.” Like “According To Plan,” it was originally much longer as you can hear. Included is one of my favorite parts that got cut…the barbershop quartet! Not to mention a weird section with the jazz band players and a crazy ending that’s totally different. The embarrassment kicks in when we get to the ladies spider section. I did my very best to sing all the parts in falsetto, but as hard as I squeezed, I could not hit the highest part in one section, so Jenny O’Grady, my British choir contractor, graciously popped on a microphone and helped me out. It’s still extremely embarrassing, but it helps a little. (Before this song went much further, all my falsetto voices were replaced by proper female voices.) Other than that one section, all the pitiful voices, male and female are mine. I think my chances of becoming a female impersonator are quite bleak, based on this experience. However, if Monty Python ever gets back together….