Redbox and the Chilipeppers – What City Please (Kay)
This song is the story of a neurotic man who dials 411 and falls in love with an operator named Kay. Then he spends the rest of his life dialing 411 over and over, hoping to talk to her again. I love how sad and pathetic this song is. It’s based on an old prank call I made around 1994, where I begged a 411 operator to connect me to Kay, insisting that Kay likes me. (Listen to the call here.) Clips from that prank are in this song.
I started this song around the beginning of 2010 and finished it on March 29th, 2011. No, I didn’t spend an entire year on it – I just stopped messing with music for most of 2010. It was originally 80BPM, but Jenn from thisisarecording.com told me that it was too slow, so I bumped it up to 85BPM. I wrote the music for the chorus first, then wrote the lyrics for the entire song.
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Below are scanned pages of the writing I did for the song, from April 2010 to March 2011.
Page 1: This page is mostly just a list of all the key phrases from the original prank call that I wanted to use in the song and a few variations of what the chorus would become.
Page 2: The first verse and chorus. The extra bit at the bottom was added in 2011 when I decided the choruses were too short.
Page 3: Verse/chorus 2 and 3.
Page 4: The extended 2nd and 3rd choruses and the chords for the piano that I kept forgetting so I wrote them down. Courage the Dog is there because I was practicing drawing him for a PLA book autograph.
