Key Lyric: “I thought of quittin’ but my heart just can’t buy it!”
Acceptance of everything I just sang about! I wanted to celebrate the absurdity of it all. What I went through, what I’m doing now with it. I’ve learned that sometimes, you just have to laugh. That’s what this song’s trying to say, and I think it’s the perfect way to end this story. I never got justice, my tuition back, even an apology from the school for how it caused me lasting harm. I just have this story. I’ll never let it go until my life looks like how it should’ve, but being angry isn’t productive. I’m just going to laugh & keep going
Purpose (Why this song?)
More than any song on the album, I entered the creation process of That’s Life with no intention of perfection or class. Reflecting on themes of absurdity alongside the song’s main focus of acceptance, it was important for me to encapsulate my attitude towards the whole situation as accurately as possible. I personally believe the things that I’ve had to accept are stupid, which became my directive through the creative process of this song. Stupid, silly, and absurd. I threw in any and every idea I had, no matter how “cringe” I thought they’d end up. I got a chipmunk voice throwing stupid adlibs around, random animal sounds taken from the Logic Sound Library to communicate “stupid monkey business,” stupid bouncy ball sounds all over the place, and best of all: Some stupid voices saying the stupid things I suspect my old college community will have on their mind when they hear the album for themselves.
But look: The isolation I lived through following everything I went through wasn’t absurd by itself. As I’ve come to learn the hard way time and time again, no one owes me a thing in this life: But the isolation I experienced following everything I went through while being in a community with foundations in Jesuit Values… that was absurd. The ways I was socially and academically/professionally punished for how I acted while going through a breakdown: Not absurd. They become absurd when you see the countless times I sought support and help knowing full-well that I couldn’t handle what I was going through on my own; times I was heard but not listened to. So, as I created absurdity through music during the recording & producing process, I’ve got some traditional instruments playing my rendition of That’s Life’s accompaniment, which I wrote to be pretty true to form for standard covers of this song you might hear. Through the creative process, I came to realize that the absurdity only “hit” when emphasized by the structures around it. Hopefully, you get that through the song!
The Creative Process:
Sonic Identity
That’s Life features a few motifs from the album, bent out of shape if you will. For example, the Steel Drums from “For Boston” & “Sunshine, Lollipops & Rainbows” return here with heavy distortion and stress, sounding almost like pots and pans being hit together. Likewise, the woodwinds played throughout the song are attached to a bit-crusher that sends the instruments into 8-bit territory during moments of movement during the track. It’s all about sounding stupid and silly against something that’d be otherwise “classic.”
Core Sounds
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Storyline
To understand the final song of the album, we must start with the track before it. See, Let The Light In wasn’t going to be the penultimate song of the album, originally. At first, it was L’appuntamento, a classic Italian pop song about waiting for a date that might never come. With this in mind, I wanted the song that follows to be something that touched on themes of acceptance. Personally, I can’t think of a better song for that topic than That’s Life! I sourced a few different renditions of the song for inspiration and got to work on my own. I didn’t want to produce a song just about acceptance, though. The song usually holds a confidence to it, which I appreciate… But I wanted to emphasize something a little different here. See, for me, it was about the acceptance of absurdity.
The entire album, up to this point, has been a reflection on getting roofied and my community’s reaction to how I sought support in its aftermath, which ultimately left me feeling like I was the perpetrator of what happened to me. That’s the message sent through their actions, anyway. In that, and in how my life’s turned out in the years since, I constantly felt and continue to feel confusion: I spoke out, and suddenly I had a Scarlet Letter! I felt punished for getting raped, I still do. As I’ve tried to make sense of that fact, I’ve always returned to how STUPID it all is. When I think about the situation being stupid, that’s when I feel normal again. So for the final song of For Boston, well, I hope it sounds stupid as hell!
Key Moments
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As previously mentioned, this lyric is the reason for Babylon’s inclusion on the tracklist of this album. Already a cute cheeky line from the original, my rendition allows the lyric to become a play on words referring equally to the Era “Before Christ,” B.C, as well as the instituion of “Boston College,” BC.
Within the song, the line is emphasized through some additional background harmonies and a little chipmunk voice saying “oh, nice!” It kinda sounds like “all night,” too, which I like. Both work for the line!
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Before the final chorus and song outro, I have a section that centers vocals that have been pitched down considerably. I sang those lyrics with the intention of sounding commanding, envisioning myself as a sweaty athletic coach instructing my team to strut it out. It becomes an important moment in the song as a short shift in energy before exploding into the track’s finale, making the loud finale sound even louder than it actually is.
