The Tooth Fairy’s Secret Stockpile: King Kaput
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Here is the milk teeth (original) demo of King Kaput:
Click here -> King Kaput demo Sep 2010
We used this version as a pre-production track for an earlier attempt at putting together a release which failed to eventuate. However, the earliest (extant) live recording that we’ve managed to dig up from the archives so far is this one below, recorded on 2009-07-18, which has some different lyrics to the finalized version of King Kaput. For example:
for now can you close the door and
let me sleep?
I only weep in waking hours
the snooze repeats
the sheets separate me from enemies
life’s gotten too sour
life’s gotten too sour
Click here -> 2009-07-18 King Kaput early version
On the 2009-07-18 recording, we were playing with our first drummer, Alex. Here’s a photo of Bang of Sun around that time:
Here are two other early attempts to play the song:
About the song
Chad: this song was co-written at my house as a kind of experiment. We’ve written quite a few others this way since. The lyrics were changed as we both lost interest in what we originally had. We still seem happy with the melody and have played it at every gig.
Pablo: This is one of the very first songs that Chad and I wrote together as “Bang of Sun”, rather than just as two dudes mucking around. It was also one of the first real collaborative efforts in terms of lyrics, vocals, chords, dynamics, the whole shebang. This song also opened quite a few doors for us, harmony-wise, too.
We experimented with two intros that didn’t eventually get used. A cool atmospheric Sun God tribal thing that we like, but which we thought would be unnecessary to include on the EP release… and a rhythmic guitar intro that we played back in the day, but which eventually got scrapped, although it wasn’t half bad…
King Kaput was first jammed out at Chad’s house, just the two of us, late June or the first week of July, 2009. I’m pretty confident that it was also the same day that we finally decided on the band’s name. I distinctly remember sitting in the mid afternoon outside his place on the front steps, chugging Takara can chu-hi, penning some of the lyrics for the second verse:
("King Canute commanding the waves to stay put... your arrogance demanding your pride to take root... if pride begets a fall, then you're gonna find that you've fallen flat on your arse...").
King Kaput is one of the few songs that Bang of Sun has written which isn’t actually about anything directly personal, although bits and pieces of it definitely have personal resonance. It’s more of a concept song than the other tunes on the EP (although The Inclination also has a concept behind it, and is almost like the darker cousin of King Kaput, or the nightmarish realization of the lyrical content of a resigned King Kaput finally taking the JR plunge)…
Bang of Sun website 