Difference between revisions of "(Since You Joined) The Corporation"

Latest revision as of 21:50, 27 April 2025

Trivia/Info

• One of the few songs recorded by Hello The Band, a project consisting of John Flansburgh and Joshua Fried. This track also features Erik Sanko on bass.
• The Corporation was a team of songwriters and record producers assembled in 1969 by Berry Gordy, the head of Motown. The group was specifically created to write and produce hit songs for the label's newly signed Jackson 5. Gordy gave the group the secretive name "The Corporation" to avoid giving particular credit to any one individual.
• Joshua Fried detailed recording the song in a 2019 interview with the Don't Let's Start fan podcast:

I had written a song actually for a Watchface piece; "(Since You Joined) The Corporation" is kind of based on that song, musically. I sort of ripped off my own chords. And then he [Flansburgh] came up with the chorus, those four guitar chords. [...] We worked really hard on that organ part. And we had this idea that we wanted an organ that was like this really old guy working for Motown who was half asleep, kind of drugged out, just so in the pocket. I labored over it, I did the long work coming up with that arrangement. [...]
The bass line actually also came mostly from me. I did a radio spot for Pepsi and it has pretty much that bass line. "The Corporation" refers to the songwriting credit on a lot of the early Jackson 5 songs. They are written by quote "The Corporation" and I don't know the story behind that, but both Flansburgh and I remarked upon that. And we said like, let's take this musical material that I had and let's turn it into a Motown-y kind of thing, something about The Corporation. So we thought about those lyrics, we came up with that concept together.

• John Flansburgh wrote of the song in a 2024 Tumblr post: "Working with Joshua Fried was a very cool experience, and his inspired bass line on that track was really the spark for that track." He explained further in 2012:

I always liked that track. Joshua put together the bass line and it's just got a nice momentum. The lyric is kind of an amplification of that weird thing where some folks find themselves in couples where their partner "goes corporate" and kind of joins the money-world. Maybe that's more in NYC than in other places, but it seemed like a thing that was sucking a lot of people in at the time (the boomin' 80s and 90s)

• The first verse echoes the lyrics of The Beatles' 1963 song "Do You Want to Know a Secret" — "Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?"
• "Sodium Mask", another track on the Hello The Band EP, is an extreme reworking of this song. Fried and Flansburgh took the MIDI sequence from "Corporation" and heavily altered it to create the new track. Fried explained in his interview with Don't Let's Start: "It's '(Since You Joined) The Corporation' in MIDI-hell-theme-song version and then further modified, I think mostly by Flans. It was the MIDI sequence in Digital Performer, which was the digital audio workstation program we were using. It's the same tempo, right? And 'Sodium Mask' is a vague reference to the lyrics of '(Since You Joined) The Corporation', I think."

Song Themes

Album Lead-Ins, Falsetto, Lies And Deception, Love, Numbers, Occupations, Questions

Videos