Track Six--Pioneer Children/My Shoe

The first of two patently LDS tunes that we performed, the other being Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy. This one differs from the other in that we decided to embellish the story a little bit. The children must have gotten tired and grumpy on the long trek from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City, and we wanted to reflect that in our piece. Therefore, we decided to add two more verses to the song. Each verse shows the progressively worse attitude that the children had, as they migrated from "sang" to "slouched" to "scowled." Eventually, this led to their rebellion, or "coup d'etat" as we called it, and they ran away.

Some thoughts about this tune.

• Why was it called "My Shoe?" Well, this has a funny story. So, we were in apartment 168, as we often were, and it was late, around 11:45pm. For those of you who don't know, that is close to curfew. We were about to head out, when we realized that Jacob Stewart's shoe was missing. As it turns out, Brigitte had stolen it and placed it under the couch. But we didn't know that. We tried to convince her to give it back, or at least tell us where it was. But she wouldn't. So, we decided to sing it out of her. We all stood in front of her, and began singing, "Pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked," creating a loop of "and walked"'s that lasted for at least 5 minutes before she gave in and gave us the shoe. Hence, we decided to spice up the song, perform it, and it was called "My Shoe" in remembrance of its initial performance. This is also why, in the recording, we repeat the "and walked" for a little bit in the beginning of the song.
• Here is a copy of the lyrics that we added in:
• Pioneer children slouched as they walked and walked and walked and walked,
• Thursday they griped and fought always,
• Sundays, repented for Thursdays.
• Pioneer children scowled as they walked and walked and walked and walked,
• So they all planned a coup d'etat,
• And they tied up their ma and pa,
• Pioneer children sang as they ran and ran and ran and ran away.
• The third and final verse was not the original final verse that we had planned. However, we decided that, sacrilegious as the whole idea is, rewriting a Primary song, our final verse took it a little too far. So we changed it to what is now our final verse. The only difference between the original final verse and the one we performed was the 3rd line. Instead of tying up their parents, the line went as such: "And they worshiped the sun god Ra." It's probably a good thing that line was re-written.
• This song is actually cross-referenced in another track. In track 3, when we are discussing which song to sing, Jacob Broderick suggests "My Shoe?" We decide not to, and the reason that we give is that the Bishop is coming. Clearly, we did not want him to hear of our sacrilegiosity.
• The song ends with a minor, dissonant chord, and an evil laugh. This was to represent the takeover of the situation by the children and the inherent chaos it would create. It was quite fun making the evil laughs and editing them using Jacob Broderick's sound-editing software. We could make echoes, reverberations so that it sounded like we were in different kinds of performance halls, etc etc.
• There is another subliminal message placed in this track. Seeing as we were talking about children and their parental relations, we decided to go for the classic Star Wars quote, "Luke, I am your father."