I was channel surfing this weekend when I caught a music video from a Christian band I used to follow before they changed their name and made it big (The Afters, formerly known as Blisse). Apparently, they had released a song earlier this year entitled MySpace Girl. It’s a sweet song, and really catchy! You can see the music video here [YouTube].

As great a song it is though, and as much as I like it, what was most surprising and also kind of disappointing is this: I had written a song (with help from my roommate Daniel) back in October 2004, but never recorded it… called Xanga Girl!!! (At that time, Xanga and blogging was the big thing on the Internet, while social networking was just catching on.) Xanga Girl was meant to be the 4th song in our “dorm room sessions” recording series, but we scrapped production, even after all the instruments were recorded and the lyrics were complete. So now I’m disappointed because even though it was never going to be released, now it seems so unoriginal.

In case you never heard about them, the “dorm room sessions” consisted of:

• Fall ‘03, a rock lament of my horrendous academic term, by me
• Without You, a sappy ballad of a shocking lost love, by Nointernet (Leah, Daniel, and me)
• Love, This Christmas, the next Christmas classic, by bringyouROWnbass  (Sharon, Daniel, and me)

Anyways, Xanga Girl was intended to be a parody of 4-power-chord generic pop-punk; after all, emo was just getting big at the time as well. And the song even topped Without You as having some of our smartest lyrical work (and some obscure references) as well. Here are snippets:

• “Xanga girl, you rock my world wide web”
• “Your blog is never more than superficiality / But that’s what I call your ‘virtual reality’”
• “I wish that I could say to you someday, ‘With this blogring I be wed’”
• “Your quizzie called me Charlie Brown, and you’re my little red-haired Xanga girl”

The reason we scrapped production is because neither of us had a good pop-punk tenor voice, and we wanted to find someone else to sing it. How sad. Well, despite being beaten to the punch (though 4 years late) by The Afters and their great song MySpace Girl, here is our vocal-less, unfinished song #4:

Xanga Girl (background track)
Music and Lyrics by Room 220 (James Szeto and Daniel Tadiarca)

[right-click to download: Room 220 - Xanga Girl (background track) - mp3 (2.84MB)]