#365songs (183 / 365)

Hey did I mention about how I like midpoints? I put my most ambitious song yet in the middle of the album it's on, and yep, it's another Blaseball song. It's silly in retrospect (hell, it was silly at the time) but Blaseball did mean a lot to me when it was going on and for a little while thereafter, and I'm very happy that it sparked my interest so much that I wrung a whole album out of that inspiration.

Blaseball may have been a baseball simulator, but it was also a videogame, and players had star ratings indicating how good they were at various things, with a summary rating for their overall "level." Winnie Hess was a 9.4-star player at the end of her career — when many of Blaseball's best players were around 5 or 6 stars — and so I had the crazy idea to write a song that was 9.4 minutes long as a tribute to her. There's more information on the Bandcamp page for this song.

The song includes a special appearance from Boyfriend Monreal, one of the league's most beloved players and the cornerstone for the Kansas City Breath Mints' first serious playoff run until they were incinerated late in season 7. I got into Blaseball too late to follow their arc but they appear at the rough midpoint of Immune to Consequences in recognition of how formative they were for the team and its fanbase.

Because this is my own song, I can't listen back to it without Evaluating it, and as a song, I think "Winnie Hess" is pretty good. My songwriting and performance style owes a lot to the Mountain Goats, who showed me that you can make incredibly compelling music with minimal technical skill as long as your songwriting is on point, and though I thought "Winnie Hess" was not much like a Mountain Goats song, when I first posted it publicly one of the comments it got was "Sounds like the Mountain Goats!" I'm fine with this. The song's main shortcoming, to me, is my singing, which is okay but needs a little more variety and character and just oomph for such a big, ambitious song. It's too timid. And I guess it's really wordy in places, which is understandable for a story song but maybe makes it drag a bit in the middle. But I do think mixing up the instrumentation (which practice I cribbed from the Fiery Furnaces) over the course of the 9 minutes keeps it relatively engaging. All in all, an imperfect song, but I'm happy I swung for the fences with it.