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Lyrics
Notes
Credits

Lyrics

Love on TV

Happy Valentine's Day is my Valentine's wish to you from me
This Valentine's Day I wish you all the love on TV

Love
My real heart couldn't take it
TV
So I turn on the tube and fake it
This Valentine's Day all I want is love on TV

"Be my Valentine"'s not what you need to say to make me happy
A real red rose just can't supplant the love on TV

Love
It's not unusual
TV
It's not unusual either
This Valentine's Day all I want is love on TV

So if you're standing here, hearing this, eating a heart-shaped cookie
You might as well be eating my heart for all the love it's brought me
I can only experience human emotion towards another person vicariously
And the only love I'm falling in is love on TV

Love
TV
This Valentine's Day all I want is love on TV
Love on TV
Love on TV

Late Life

"Singles scene"
I guess I see what they mean
Plenty of women avoiding men
I scan the place
For just one friendly face
Sidewalk.com has lied again
And normally it's my favorite bar
So I drove down and parked my car
But this is not where the people are
Tonight

She sings songs
From the stage while I hum along
As I look around, and I drink my beer
The talk is loud
From the solitary crowd
I hear they filmed scenes from Singles here
It could have been the perfect night
With girls on the stage in clothing tight
But I'm not doing something right
And no one welcomes me to late life
Late life
No one welcomes me to late life

If something shines
Underneath the beers and wines
I'm not perceiving the subtlety
If something glows
At these late, peculiar shows
Everyone sees it except for me
I heard her sing she wants his head
Inside a box, inside her bed
But she's on stage, and I'm misled
And this is what she means by "late life"
Late life
This is what she means by "late life"
This is what she means by "late life"

Kiss Locally

Lick my lips and tongue my teeth
Chew my chin from underneath
Breathe my breath of ecstasy
It's fun to feel you next to me
Your picture makes me want to play
It's hard when you're so far away
Some come to my proximity
Kiss locally, kiss locally

(Kiss me here)
Kiss me in familiar places
(Kiss me here)
Don't kiss the lips of foreign faces
I want you here and close to me
Kiss locally, kiss locally

Geography's not my game
All those states all look the same
I need a map to help me see
When you're not where you should be
A photograph of your image
Is flat as magnets on my fridge
I want to feel you in 3D
Kiss locally, kiss locally

(Kiss me here)
If we kiss in the same city
(Kiss me here)
We can kiss more accurately
I want you here and close to me
Kiss locally, kiss locally

When I finally get you in my grip
I'm never gonna let go of your lips
I'll occupy your mouth, so you can't say
You're ever gonna have to go away
I'll kiss your stomach if you let me see
And other things in that locality
I'll kiss you anyplace you tell me to
I'll kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss you

Your presence is a luxury
I miss you when you're far from me
So come in my vicinity
Kiss locally, kiss locally, kiss locally, kiss locally, kiss locally, kiss locally

Notes

"Love on TV" is one of the quickest songs I‘ve ever written. It must have been a Saturday morning in early February 1997. I was reading the newspaper (I used to subscribe to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer), and there were two articles side by side: one by Martha Stewart telling me how to make the perfect heart-shaped cookies for Valentine's Day, and one about all the Valentine's Day specials on television, with a picture of that guy from "Mad About You" and Aliens. I think the song was done in about 2 hours. As you may surmise, I did not have a Valentine that year. I used to perform this tune for small groups of friends as a loungey, kind of mopey, electric piano-led number.

A few years later, this song also marked the beginning of my rock collaboration with fellow former Sierra sound guy Mike Caviezel. I had been working on a promising videogame prototype; it would have been a new King's Quest game, re-imagined as a platformer for consoles. Then on Valentine's Day 2002, the executive producer of the project called us into a meeting room with his mouth full of turkey sandwich and mumbled, "Well, there's no good way to say it, guys," and I thought, "How about swallowing first?" With our game so unceremoniously cancelled, I gave myself the afternoon off. I went into Mike's office and told him he had to stop what he was doing; we had a hit single to record. We knocked out this new arrangement pretty quick, thanks to Mike's impeccable rock chops.

We were both pleased with the results, and Mike asked if I had any other old tunes I wanted to work up rock-style, so I pulled out "Late Life," which I must have written not too long after "Love on TV." It describes a pretty common experience I had shortly after moving to Seattle: going out on the town to catch some live music, driving across the bridge from Bellevue, where I worked, to Seattle, where the action was, and having the odd sensation of being very alone in a busy, crowded place. (I would often use an ancient online listings guide called sidewalk.com, which receives a shout out, to check event addresses and show times.) I used to haunt the OK Hotel, down underneath the Alaskan Way viaduct, which I'm told was featured in the film Singles (which, I must admit, I have yet to see). Wayne Horvitz's group Zony Mash, my favorite Seattle band, would often play there, until the place was condemned after the Nisqually earthquake in 2001, and the scene moved over to the 700 Club.

On the particular night described in the song, I was at the OK Hotel, and there was a band named McKinney, I think, or something like that, and I remember humming along to their cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry." The headliner was a bit of a letdown, a solo set by Golden Palominos alumnus Lori Carson. I really wasn't into it, but she had one song that stuck with me, with a refrain that went, "I wish I had your head in a box." The initial version of "Late Life" was also pretty loungey and mopey, and I have a sloppy recording somewhere that features a djembe and uses a pair of Birkenstocks as a percussion instrument.

Since these two songs had been such fun to put together, I decided to write a new song for us to work up, "Kiss Locally," about the pleasures and travails of a long-distance relationship. It's chock full of alliteration and changes of meter, and it modulates to the dominant for the guitar solo, an occasion to which Mike rises.

In the midst of all this activity, Mike came in to my office one day and said, "Here's the plan; we're going to start a band, and you're going to play bass." I had barely a working knowledge of the instrument, but I nonetheless gamely agreed, and we began rehearsals, with his childhood chum Sandy Leek on drums, and my new music cohort Korby Sears on rhythm guitar. Our repertoire included these three songs of mine, plus a whole backlog of rocking numbers Mike had been working on. Eventually, for reasons practical, artistic, and altogether amicable, Korby and I seceded to form Subpoenaed Lemur and do more quirky material with canned drums and costumes, while Mike found replacements with a more thorough rock pedigree. Together they adopted the band name 99 Men (after Mike's song "99 Man") and released the slamming album "So Last Century" in 2004. (I sang some backing vocals on the track "Big Party," and helped with the arrangement, particularly the backwards guitar intro.)

That same year, I moved to Shanghai, and for a long time "Kiss Locally" was the most recent pop song in my catalog, as I turned my attention to other genres, performing sets of ambient electronic laptop stuff around Shanghai. My days for the past 3.5 years have been occupied with being the audio director of Tom Clancy's EndWar, a big real-time strategy game for Xbox 360 and PS3, developed by Ubisoft and released on Nov. 4, 2008. The masterfully rocking soundtrack for the game was written by some other good friends from my Seattle days, Alistair Hirst and Matt Ragan of Omni Interactive Audio, and I think together we've achieved a new milestone in responsive game soundtracks.

While working on EndWar, inspired by the slamming soundtrack we were assembling, I got an idea for a new song, pieced together during my lunchtime trips to the gym, that would sum up the game's main thrust. I quickly realized this would be a good chance to give Mike a call and get the old band back together for an intercontinental collaboration. The result is the tune "EndWar," which plays over the game's end credits (listen to it here, read more about it here).

I did my best to get the EndWar soundtrack released as a digital download before leaving Ubisoft two months ago, but amazingly, the powers that be can't seem to figure out how to do this. So Mike and I thought that at least we could get these other tunes by Ben Houge & 99 Men out there on the internet for interested parties to enjoy. (We're also working on a small scale physical CD release, but it will likely only be available in China, since that's where I live.)

So please enjoy them!

• —Ben Houge, Shanghai, November 5, 2008

Credits

Composed by Ben Houge.
Performed by Ben Houge (vocals) and Mike Caviezel (everything else).
Arranged, produced, and recorded by Ben Houge and Mike Caviezel.
Special thanks to Korby Sears and Subpoenaed Lemur.
Album cover by Ben Houge and Jutta Friedrichs.

Copyright 2008 Ben Houge (BMI).

www.benhouge.com
www.99men.com