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Thursday, May 15, 2014

The Story Behind "Drowning in the Basement"

If you asked either of us where "rapping" fell on the list of Crazy Things We're Going To Do As A Married Couple, we'd both probably say: "Nowhere." Because it never would have occurred to either of us that it would ever happen. But we had so much fun creating "The Penny Pinching Rap"—which talk show host Katie Couric called an "ode to Dave Ramsey"—that we wanted to make another one.

We considered a variety of topics—married life, my motorcycle, an ice cream cone that fell on the ground—but when the topic of our flooded basement kept coming up Dani finally said that we had to do a rap about that.

Which comes first—music or words? For me it's always words. For two reasons:

  1. I'm a writer. I like words.

  2. I don't know jack about music.

After penning a first verse and a bunch of lines for a couple choruses, I couldn't think of a second verse. I presented my problem to Dani and said, "The only thing I can think of is you talking about how impossible it is to find someone who knows how to fix basements."

And she said, "There you go! Just have me a tell the story."

I created the music in Apple's GarageBand (because that's how sophisticated I am), and then we recorded our vocals, completed the audio track, and finally filmed the video.

People have already remarked about how they're delighted to see that we can take a stressful thing like a flooded basement and make fun of it. In truth, that's pretty much all we can do. We have a sump pump that works hard at controlling the incoming water, but our house sits right on top of the moisture bed and so water flows through our basement almost like a stream sometimes. When it rains hard, that poor sump pump runs almost all day. We can't afford to perform the exterior drainage work required to permanently fix the problem, not now anyway, but as long as it's under control we can live with it.

In the meantime we might as well just have fun and laugh because there's too much life to enjoy to get bent out of shape over spilled milk... er, water. So until our next major life event that inspires another rap video, we hope everyone gets a kick out of "Drowning in the Basement!"


Keep pinchin' :-)

2 comments:

  1. I can’t stop laughing while watching the video! It definitely lightens the mood of bailing out the water from the basement. Anyway, have you made plans on how you can prevent the water from getting in? Though you might have a sump pump by now, it can be stressful to pump the water out and dry the basement all over again. Thoughts?

    Gail Wallace @ Emergency Flood Masters

    ReplyDelete