A fun way to watch an author stutter is to ask, "Where do you get your ideas from?" Well, not today buck-o. This story came to me as my plane was touching down into EWR - Newwark NJ - I had just finished reading an article in the New Yorker (of all places) by Malcolm Gladwell about how the music industry was using computers to take apart past hits, boil them down to their essential parts, compare these bones to the bones in a new piece of music and use statistical analysis to decide whether or not the new song will be a hit before it is released.

Whatever happened to just using your ears?

Anyways, if you have all these old bones laying around and a few supercomputers at your disposal, how hard a leap is it to imagine computers assembling their own Frankenstein pop songs? Listening to recent radio, I would hope it's not too hard. But. What if the computers succeeded beyond everyone's wildest expectations? And what exactly is the ultimate goal of the perfect pop song anyways?

The seed was sown and not more than a day afterwards I stumbled across the song Robot Rock by Daft Punk. A song with only two lyrics that just sticks in your head and will not leave. The rest of the story pretty much wrote itself.

This one was published in an online journal called the Random Eye Sees It. Which I believe is still somewhere online. I didn't like the ending on that one and redid it for this version. Looking back, I have to wonder why it did just jump right out at me - so perfect, so sweet!