The Jolly Warblers

The Jolly Warblers were a band that performed during my junior year of high school (2021-2022) and existed conceptually throughout my senior year (2022-2023).

Okay, well, calling the Warblers a "band" is a bit generous. Two of my closest pals in high school (bass and guitar), myself (vocals), and my school's former director of STEM facilities (drums) got together infrequently throughout our junior year and performed renditions of Green Day's "Brain Stew" for what could only in the loosest sense be described as an audience (classmates). Three of these performances were recorded by yours truly. I believe we worked on other songs, but I'm having difficulty recalling what those would have been.

A reasonable question would be: why were we repeatedly performing "Brain Stew", of all songs? There were really only two reasons: one, I could pull off a half-decent Billie Joe Armstrong impression, and two, "Brain Stew" was easy for my buddies to learn on their respective instruments.

Outside of that one song, my friends and I had joked around about what we'd title an album from the band. Names thrown around included Black Chicken and Warblin' On. The second one isn't half-bad, actually. I designed a mockup album cover based on the former:

Aside from these concepts, I used "The Jolly Warblers" as an alias during my senior year while experimenting with:

• A mashup of Eddie Money's "Baby Hold On" and Eminem's "Lose Yourself"

• An "intro" track that transitioned seamlessly into the aforementioned mashup

• A combination of Weezer's "Undone" instrumental and a rambling vocal track I did in one take while congested

Real promising material, I know. I like Neil Cicierega, what can I say?

In all seriousness, the band was my first exposure to the idea of my very own music-based pseudonym. After graduating from high school, I started Warbler Project, which I named after the band to maintain a sense of... "self-fulfilling context", I guess. Traces of that kind of musical doodling from my solo endeavors as The Jolly Warblers eventually found their way into my work as part of The 2002.

I'm very tempted to upload the Brainstew Compendium, but those recordings are... very not great. Maybe someday. On that note, I even suppose that under some very specific circumstances there'd be a nonzero chance the Warblers could reunite and perform, but I honestly wouldn't mind if it's a just-zero.

Long live being jolly.