Over 20 years in the making, literally. I’ve been working on this project for a few months now on and off. This represents every year of my life in 4 songs or less. Each song represents what I was listening to, and my feelings around that time.

One important note is that just because its on this list doesn’t mean I like the song anymore. A great example of this is the “Bangarang”. I now find the song rather irritating, and dislike the random cursing at the end, but it is what I like at the time, and representative of my rebellious phase.

As for the years in between the songs, I created those by renaming a sound effect to the year I wanted and then importing it via local files. They are not intended to be heard.

For the music video, I got costuming from Goodwill, and used what else I had in my apartment.

Everything was recorded by myself, often multiple times. In the video, I couldn’t see how it looked until AFTER I had recorded it. I used smart lighting to make the room the various different colors seen in the video. The finale proved to be especially challenging as the camera didn’t know what to focus on. Using real candles by my side proved to be too much light, so I opted to only use fake LED ones instead, and have a real candle by my feet, blown by a fan to give a nice flickering effect.

I was worried about uploading this project to any platform, because the legality of such projects are very murky, and often come down to the whim of the right holders. Thankfully, after a bit of learning and finagling I was able to get it posted to all major music platforms. Annoyingly, there’s another artist named “Mr.Wonka” that Apple Music tied my song to. He only started releasing music this year, and apparently couldn’t be bothered to search and/or didn’t care that I already own the domain, and have a sizeable YouTube channel with a very similar name. I’m currently working on resolving the issue.

*Not legally a parody, because it isn’t a commentary on the original song, but instead a lyric swap.