Pair #25: "Songs to Wear Pants to Theme"

"SONGS TO WEAR PANTS TO THEME"
Original Post Links: Version 1 | Version 2
Original Post Date: July 7, 2004
Runtime: 0:34 (version 1) ; 0:52 (version 2)
Genres: Ballad (version 1) ; Rock (version 2)
Compilation Album: Green Pants

Prompt Summary: a theme song for Songs to Wear Pants To—what a shocker!

---

We've hit 25 posts, so I'm doing something special today: two songs for the price of one. Except they're technically the same song. And they have the exact same title. And they were originally released the same day. So basically this is one song, just from two different universes. Or maybe it's like light: one thing made up of two phenomena existing in the same space at the same time. I am going to stop trying to explain this because I'm getting a headache.

Anyway, this is the official theme song(s) for the Songs to Wear Pants To website. Appropriately named "Songs to Wear Pants To Theme," each version of this song is a response to a separate prompt that asked Andrew to write a theme song for STWPT. Neither had any suggestions for genre, though the one used for the second* version does raise the idea of using an actual pair of pants as an instrument, an idea that not only did Andrew run with but that is also ingenious.

Both versions have basically the same lyrics: "Songs to Wear Pants To is a website. It has some songs, and you can listen to them in your computer. All you have to do is right-click and 'Save as….'" They also have the same basic melody. And that is where the similarities end.

Version 1 is a slow ballad, with a lone guitar accompanying Andrew's impassioned vocals. The mood is somewhat broken at the end, when Andrew's strumming goes out of control, leading to a delightfully awkward chuckle to punctuate the theme song.

Version 2 is an energetic rock song (though only slightly faster than the other version), with an electric guitar and percussion rounding out the vocals. This is Andrew at his STWPT-est, just losing himself in the song, getting us all super excited for Songs to Wear Pants To. This version has an interlude, however: a "pants solo." For said pants solo, all the music cuts out except for the faint sound of Andrew "playing" a pair of pants. At first, it sounds sounds like he's just rubbing his hand or something else against a pair of pants, with no sense of rhythm, before he eventually finds a beat while doing something more akin to drumming. You might have to turn your volume up for this solo.

Both versions are perfect theme songs for the late website. Not every Song to Wear Pants To is fast-paced and instrumentation-rich, but even the ones that aren't tend to devolve into some kind of craziness. Meanwhile, STWPT is all about fun and experimentation. It is perfect that we got these two different sides of the same coin because just one of them alone would not have done the site justice.

 

*Ever played the Oracle games in the Legend of Zelda franchise? In case you haven't, they're two standalone games that can each be "connected" to the other to make either game the sequel to the other. In effect, you get a chicken-or-egg scenario, where canonically, each one takes place both before and after the other. That's what we have here. There's no actual "Version 1" and "Version 2"; they're both "Songs to Wear Pants To Theme." I just applied version numbering here to make my life infinitely easier. It wasn't entirely random, though, as the one I refer to as "Version 1" was posted before the other one. While there are no discernible timestamps, we can probably safely assume that Andrew posted them in close succession, meaning "Version 1" is the first version in the way that one twin is older than another. There, wasn't that a fun footnote? What a ride!