| Title (alphabetical) |
Tune |
Subject | Notes |
| 500 Miles by Bicycle | 500 Miles (Pretenders) |
Original | Inspired by the most tiring day of the once-traditional Jaunt with Jim Klobuchar Iron Range bike trip. |
| The Ambulocetus Song | The Hippopotamus Song (Flanders & Swann) |
Original | Companion piece to my unpublished story "Walking Whale." |
| Angry Birdsong | The Swallow Song (Joan Baez) |
Angry Birds | Aside from Angry Birds being passe now, this is one of my favorite parodies. |
| Baby Bumpkin | Some song from the 90s I don't even remember |
Original | Theme song for a panther character called Kristen from my aborted first novel, The Fruitful Circle. |
| The Basilisk Hunters | Original | Original | I wanted to write one of those patterned "gets longer" songs, but it didn't quite work out. |
| Bee of the Bird of the Moth (extra verses) | Bee of the Bird of the Moth (They Might Be
Giants) |
Extension | Just one of a couple playful TMBG songs I felt like extending. |
| Big Blue Pool and a Billion Trees | Big Black Horse and a Cherry Tree (KT
Tunstall) |
The Magician's Nephew (The Chronicles of Narnia) by C. S. Lewis | No notes! |
| Black Bodies (extra verses) |
My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean (trad.) Parody by Poul Anderson |
Physics |
People decided to update this physics classic with new verses for new science! |
| Bleeding | Unfinished song by Nate Bucklin, original melody added |
Unfinished song by Nate Bucklin, original content added | Nate
suggested a collaboration and described a chorus and general song
concept he'd been thinking about, and I wrote verses and accidentally
composed a melody. He was originally going to write his own melody, but
found the meter too complicated. |
| Broken Morning | Morning Has Broken (Eleanor Farjeon) | Parody | It gets jazzy and fast halfway through. |
| The Burger Connection | The Rainbow Connection (Paul Williams) |
Bob's Burgers (TV show created by Loren Bouchard) | No notes! |
| Can You Remember | Try to Remember (Harvey Schmidt) |
Original | I asked someone at a boba tea place and he said you can pronounce 'taro' a couple ways. |
| The Candy Tree | The Baby Tree (Rosalie Sorrels) |
Original | Created for entertaining trick-or-treaters on Halloween. |
| A Celebration of Animals | Original |
Original | My second seventeen-verse song. |
| A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Song | Original |
Original | For use with an audience who use collective gestures to decide which way the song goes. My longest song... kind of. |
| Clever, So Clever | Original | From my webcomic, Fabulous Clem | I performed this in a video with an actual fennec fox once. |
| Coca-Cola
Forever |
Always Coca-Cola (Terry Coffey & Jon Nettlesbey) | Parody | Parody of that famous jingle performed by Christina Aguilera. |
| The Cooking Skills of Man | The Quiet Faith of Man (Bill Staines) |
Original | No notes! |
| Crittersweet | Just the Girl (The Click Five) |
Original | No notes! |
| Daredevil Davy's Lament | Original |
From my unfinished 2005 NaNovel | About a breakfast cereal mascot who's been made sentient. |
| Darzee's Chaunt (extended version) | Original |
Extension of a song from "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling | The
weaver bird gets interrupted after four verses in the story. We
can safely assume his song would have been seventeen verses long
otherwise! |
| Delivery | Original | Original | Written for the joke religion of the Great Blue Lion that I was part of in college. |
| The Devil's Bouncer | Original |
Original | Inspired by an folk song about a young man who meets the Devil at a bridge. |
| Do You Love a Kitty? | Do You Love an Apple/IBM (Laramie Sasseville, filk of "Do You Love an Apple" [traditional]) |
Parody | Inspired by Laramie's beloved late tabby. |
| Dona Dona (dragon remix) | Dona Dona (Sholom Secunda, for the play Esterke by Aaron Zeitlin) | Parody | Just thought the premise of the original was quirky enough to riff on. |
| Doomshadow |
Moonshadow (Cat Stevens) |
DungeonQuest board game | An expansion of the game has a single card called Doomshadow, and that was enough to get me going. |
| Dory of Morro Bay | Charlie on the MTA (Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes) | Finding Dory (Disney/Pixar) | No notes! |
| Dr. Mario theme lyrics | Fever & Chill (Dr. Mario video game by Nintendo) |
Original | When I play the game, I just wanna sing along! |
| Du Wacky Du | Willow, Tit-Willow (from The Mikado by Gilbert & Sullivan) |
A card from the Morgan's Tarot deck | This
was a response to a low-key challenge from my filk circle to write a
song that rhymes both 'pterodactyl' and 'quetzalcoatl'. |
| Falling Range | Rhythm of the Falling Rain (The Cascades) |
Original | For singing when the group's voices are tired. |
| Fish Fractions | Fish Heads (Barnes & Barnes) |
Frog Fractions (video game) | No notes. |
| Fort Lucenne Mall | Red Rubber Ball (Bruce Woodley & Paul Simon) | Night in the Woods | Included as a bonus song in my Night in the Woods fan novella. |
| The Fox (in Socks) | The Fox (traditional) |
Fox in Socks (Dr. Seuss) | No notes! |
| The Fox's Lesson | You Can't Hurry Love (The Supremes) |
The Little Prince | The arrangement of parts isn't obvious - sorry! |
| Gabu's Song | I Will Follow You into the Dark (Death Cab for Cutie) |
Arashi no Yoru Ni | From my Arashi no Yoru Ni fan novel. |
| Gingerbread People | Rainy Day People (Gordon Lightfoot) |
Original | No notes! |
| Go North | Go West (Village People) |
Original | An unpublished and unnamed setting in which I wrote unpolished short stories as a teenager. |
| The Hearts | The Rose (Amanda McBroom) |
Original | I mean it's about a card game. |
| The
History of Physics 101 (extra verse) |
Battle Hymn of the Republic (Julia Ward Howe) |
The History of Physics 101 (filk song) | Someone
in my filk circle suggested an update to this song for string theory,
so I composed a quatrain and we pasted it in our books. |
| Hit the Road, Cats | Hit the Road, Jack (Ray Charles) |
Zero Wing | Inspired by the old "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" meme. |
| I am a Roc | I Am a Rock (Simon & Garfunkel) |
Original | Composed part of it while biking the Midtown Greenway in the summer (and singing aloud). |
| It Hearts You | Original |
Original | This song is half pause. It's meant to be tender and vulnerable. |
| Keen to Play Lode Runner |
Billie Jean (Michael Jackson) |
Lode Runner |
Wrote as a prize for Argen, the winner of my 23 Skidoo contest in August of '24. |
| Kiss from a Rock | Kiss from a Rose (Seal) |
Inspired by an unpublished short story called "The Basilisk Unveiled" | I later wrote another song to the same tune, something I've never done before or since. |
| The Leg Dance | Original |
Secret project I used to imagine as a teen | I will not tell! |
| The Lessons of Time | The Longest Time (Billy Joel) |
Parody | I
wrote this while walking the streets of San Jose while staying with
acquaintances in 2003. I sang it for one evening's entertainment. |
| Level Three | Lemon Tree (Harry Bellafonte) |
Original | I
don't play anything but drums, but I tried arranging chords for this
song on an old Casio keyboard. They turned out to be way too
complicated for normal guitar work, oops! |
| The Lifeguard | Original | Original | A
bunch of poems I wrote around age twenty in a format I invented.
I still don't have a good name for it, I just call it abcbacab.
Invented a tune for it later. |
| The Lode Runner Song | Original |
Lode Runner (Sierra edition, The Legend Returns) | Every element in the '94 edition, which I honored (in a different order) in my Sequence set. |
| Love You, Bea | Let It Be (The Beatles) |
Night in the Woods | Included as a bonus song in my Night in the Woods fan novella. |
| Lucky Bear |
I'm a Gummi Bear (Gummibär) (Extended version) | Original | There's
a section in the middle that's in the song's full-length file, but not
the famous video. This idea seems unique and moves me! |
| Man Playing Scrabble | Man Come into Egypt (Fran Minkoff & Fred Hellerman) |
Scrabble (board game) | I had to amend the score in the song because I'd added it incorrectly. Sarah McMahill later wrote a response song to this. |
| Many a New Scale | Many a New Day (Oklahoma by Rodgers & Hammerstein) |
Original | No notes! |
| Marsupial Fandom (extra verses) | The Temperance Union (traditional) |
Original | An extension of a traditional filk song. My father wrote the koala verse. |
| Mei's Lullaby | Yan Tan Tethera song (Yorkshire traditional) | Original | Written for my Arashi no Yoru Ni fan novel. |
| A Memo to Class Dinosauria, Signed God | Original |
Original | It's not up to Dr. Jane's standards, but hey. |
| The Merry Song of Betty Thong | Original | Original | One of the first songs I ever wrote. A little embarrassing. |
| More 'f the Landwitch o' the West | The Witch of the Westmoreland (Stan Rogers) |
Parody | Wrote in high school, started during a pep rally. Every line is more or less scrambled. |
| Murderous Little Toy | The Marvelous Toy (Tom Paxton) |
Original | Too easy to write, probably not worth it. |
| My Pet Is Called Nature | Original | Original | A weird formulaic song. I brought it to my college admissions interview for some reason. |
| On Top of Spaghetti (Discordian remix) | On Top of Spaghetti (Tom Glazer) |
Discordia (religion) | Wrote this for the Discordia caucus conference in college. |
| One Was Yopu | One Was Johnny (Carole King, about a book by the same title by Maurice Sendak) |
Original | Yopu is an old screenname for my friend Mbala. |
| Our House | You're Always Welcome at Our House (Shel Silverstein) |
Extension | There was a version of this song done by festie-type friends of mine... like a nerd, I wrote my own verses. |
| People Will Think We're in League | People Will Think We're in Love (Oklahoma by Rodgers & Hammerstein) |
Original | With references to various games, and general gaming concepts. |
| Q in Check | Original |
Original | Wordplay. |
| The RadiShTree |
The Brandy Tree (Gordon Bok) |
Original | In
memory of when Minicon and CONvergence were held at this Minneapolis
hotel, when it seemed like no fannish convention would ever happen
there again... but now, oddly, Minicon and some other cons have
returned thence. |
| Sailing Toward the Morning | Turning Toward the Morning (Gordon Bok) |
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (The Chronicles of Narnia) by C. S. Lewis | This one got too popular! |
| Salamander Embers | Original | Original | Written for the joke religion of the Great Blue Lion that I was part of in college. |
| Sam of the Dance | Lord of the Dance (traditional) |
Green Eggs & Ham (Dr. Seuss) | No notes! |
| Scentsongs | Original | From an unfinished audio play called "One Thousand Lives" (rehashed poorly here) | No notes! |
| School of Magic Inventory | Original | School of Magic (game) | Wrote this at the request of Laramie Sasseville, who was playing the game at the time. |
| Shattered Church Window | Original | Night in the Woods (video game) | From my Night in the Woods fan novella. |
| Silly Little Starstrung | Lady Madonna (The Beatles) |
Obliquely related to an unpublished sequel to my own book, What Is Best? | I
imagine this song being sung in a non-canon version of one of the game
shows I run in my head sometimes, by a cute goofy little mink who's
been hiding the fact she's an evil genius. |
| Song of the Mother Wolf | Original | From my fan novel about Arashi no Yoru ni (One Stormy Night), Arashi No Kanata (Beyond the Storm) | I came up with a tune for it, but now I'm not sure I remember it! |
| Stand Right There | Stand By Me (Ben E. King) |
Original | With an eye on Wile E. Coyote. |
| Stars 'n' Bars 2016 | The Star-Spangled Banner |
Parody | If
I were ever asked to sing the national anthem for some occasion, I
would agree, on condition I could sing it * Bawdy *
Fast and * All four verses. That's silly enough, but this is a
sort of mangled modern 'translation' of the song. |
| Strange Things | Similar to "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat" (Guys & Dolls) |
Original | No notes! |
| Used to
Anything |
Disturbingly original |
Original | This
song originally used colors to indicate repeated notes and points of
emphasis. The idea is that it starts with an alternating tritone
interval which is initially disturbing, then packages that into a
smaller, now-familiar unit so that further deviations can serve as a
new source of disturbance. |
| Walking Lullaby | Original | From my unfinished 2004 NaNovel | A nice song... too bad I'll probably never publish the book. |
| Waters of Babble-On | Waters of Babylon (Lee Hays, arrangement from The Book of Psalms) |
Parody | Sorry. |
| Watership Down | Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush, about the novel of the same name by Emily Brontë) |
Watership Down by Richard Adams | I also designed a board game inspired by this novel. |
| What Is a Vine | Original |
From a room description on Endless Round MUCK, based on Disney's The Lion King | I
like singing this on Halloween. The secret on the MUCK was to
type 'MIX' in order to escape the room, since it's 1009 in Roman
numerals. |
| What Is My Spirit | Original | Original | I used to sing this on Halloween sometimes. Tune starts out the same as the round "Earth my body." |
| When I Am a Toad | When I'm 64 (The Beatles) |
Original | Realized it was kinda dumb when I tried performing it at some remote con I don't remember! |
| Wilds Most Outer |
Land Down Under (Men at Work) |
Outer Wilds (video game) |
It's a really cool game - I highly recommend you play it and get hints from me when you get stuck! |
| The Wind
Song (extended version) |
The Wind Song from Arashi no Yoru Ni: Himitsu no Tomodachi | Arashi no Yoru Ni | Extension of the song for my Arashi no Yoru Ni fan novel. |
| Words Are Also Like | Words Are Like (They Might Be Giants) |
Original | Just one of a couple playful TMBG songs I felt like extending. |
| Your Mom Is SO Fat | From a Distance (Bette Midler) |
Original | No notes! |