This track has a story.

Initially, it was about managing to make a decent track out of a melody that had been playing in my head for… about 10 years. The first attempts were put together years ago using LMMS. They were not good at all: LMMS is great for certain things, but not as great for others. Then this year, when I rebuilt a decent studio setup and went back to Reaper, I gave another go at it and… oh joy! It started to sound decent.

So far I had a house-ish track with a vibe similar to those romantic french movies from the 70s and 80s. Those who grew up watching “La Boum” and such will know what I mean.
But then I stumbled upon a movie on archive.org called “My Man Godfrey”, a delightful romantic comedy from 1936 starring Carole Lombart and William Powell. The movie being Public Domain I thought it would be okay to sample dialogs from it and rearrange them to tell a slightly different story. I added them to the track and… a miracle! It sounded fantastic! I was in heaven!

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I decided to be 100% sure and checked whether it was actually legal to sample a movie in the Public Domain and… I got serious doubts. From what I understand, the movie could still be copyrighted in other countries, or its soundtrack (or its written dialogs) might still be protected. The joys of the current copyright mess… The only way to be sure would be to ask a lawyer to check whether the sampling is legit as far as his knowledge goes.
Right.
This is exactly why I believe copyright has it sooo wrong.

So I decided not to take the risk. I do find the whole thing ridiculous, but I don’t want to create any sort of trouble to the kind hosters of my tunes so I did a version without the dialogs. This is why this release has only one single track: a “romantic”, instrumental house tune. A bit of a shame if you ask me, but better than nothing!

The good news is: the track is under CreativeCommons BY-SA 4.0, which is as permissive as it gets while respecting intellectual property. So share it, mix it, spread it as you wish. Just leave my name next to it ;-)