Say you're a budding musician. You've got your mom's old acoustic guitar, you bought a shitty bass at a pawn shop for about fifty bucks, you're trying to write lyrics and sing outside of the shower and everything. But one day, while browsing tabs online, you find out something unusual. You're shockingly good at playing along with the guitar part for Everything Is Alright, written and performed by Motion City Soundtrack.
You blink, surprised that your fingers have suddenly gotten so swift and deft along the fretboard. Thrilled at this stroke of fortune, you jump over to the window bearing the tabs for Wonderwall, but... No, you still suck. You butcher a classic for the seventh time that day.
Frustrated, you flip back to Ultimate-Guitar.com, and pick another Motion City Soundtrack song out of spite, knowing that your ability to play along with Everything Is Alright is a weird fluke. But, as the chords for Time Turn Fragile begin their pop-punk earfucking, your fingers spasm, and start playing perfectly.
You're scared. You try a dozen of their songs. You can play them all. You throw your bass on. Every note is nigh perfectly recreated alongside the MP3. You even try singing along, and you're able to hit the same cadence as their singer with the stupid haircut, pitch perfectly.
But, every time you try to play anything unrelated to Motion City Soundtrack, you're back to your normal, rudimentary skills. You try other pop-punk songs, nothing. You try imaginging Motion City Soundtrack playing songs by other bands, nada. You even go into Garageband and try cutting together a Bloc Party or an Interpol song into the track, and every time the song switches, your fingers suddenly get stiff, crunchy, and you're normal again.
Four months of daily practice pass by. You're still the god of Motion City Soundtrack covers, and slightly, marginally better at playing songs by other bands. By this time, MCS has released a new album, and unsurprisingly, you're able to play along without so much as a second thought. But goddamnit, you still play anything else like a thirteen year old four months into getting his first six-string.
Then, a moment of hesitation, perhaps fear, perhaps dirty excitement. You close your eyes, mentally place yourself in a room with the rest of Motion City Soundtrack, and write down a few dozen lines of lyrics. You focus, pull out your guitar, and make up some chords. Ditto your bass, and you even pat out a drum rhythm on your desk. You record each of the layers into your audio software of choice, and god damn it all, you have just created what sounds like the hit single for a new Motion City Soundtrack album, words and all, only different if that the vocals sound like Bad Haircut Man trying to imitate you imitating him. You repeat this three more times in the same night, creating the second single, a ballad, and a remarkably decent b-side.
The question is this. What, if anything, do you do with your bizzare, newfound skills?
You forsake other genres in your creative output, you start a band, you neglect to mention you can't do anything else, you get signed, and you dress as differently as possible from Motion City Soundtrack from now on. You'll have fooled them all. But really, let's hear it.
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