The Internet is a big place. It is too easy to look the wrong direction for a while and miss something interesting. I can thank a fake snake for helping me find We Sing Your Tweets, about six months after they started using Twitter as a muse.
The musical duo of Kevyn Smith and Jeremy Johnson recently paid tribute to @BronxZooCobra, the joke Twitter account tweeting on behalf of a missing snake in a New York zoo (since found). A tweet from April 5—Enough! Tonight I’m busting out. Just like that new A&E show, call me “Breakout King Cobra.” Nothing can stop me!—turned into a half-minute song. That was the rabbit hole that led to a few hundred other tweeted songs, or “sweets.”
My WeSingYourTweets Playlist
The process is a “social experiment” that is both a creative spark and a way to use their talents to highlight interesting content they find on Twitter. Attention to their work got a boost when they sweeted the Real Housewives of Atlanta last November. The following month, NPR interviewed them about their project and asked them to do a sweetment of the top retweets of 2010. Well into 2011, they are still recording short-form songs.
Earlier this week, there was a great little interview with the musicians in Turnstyle that includes the following tidbits:
- Writing sweets is quicker than writing lyrics, because the narrative is fixed
- The melodic potential of a tweet is a key factor.
- They generate about 60 sweets a week, through a couple night’s work.
- They will keep doing sweets until it isn’t fun anymore. It’s fun now.
The project has already had a few thematic endeavors, including holidays (Halloween and Christmas) and the State of the Union, and plans to visit Twitter archives to tweet first posts from other people. In between sweets, the songwriters play for a band called Dave Hates Chico.
I wonder what it would take to get sweets for my favorite favorite tweets. Maybe they need to make a new sub-genre for overheards.