Composer's Note
The Tales of Taylor Theme is a purely electronic work written and produced for my friend—professional Twitch Streamer and YouTuber—Taylor Smith who goes by the online moniker Tales of Taylor (a reference to the Tales video game franchise). The song will be featured in a forthcoming Raid Video for the channel.1 It is also being reworked lyrically into a standalone Jazz/Funk tune to be titled Barcelona.
The piece—performed by the composer—was written as a theme song for Smith’s Twitch channel, on which he streams mainly Pokémon-related content. Thus, the work is brimming with references—both musical and lyrical—to video games and Pokémon. The vast majority of the content is original music, with a minor musical quotation from Pokémon Stadium 2 and a handful of voice-over samples from Super Smash Bros. and the Persona series, as well as audio from a handful of Smith’s live-streams. The work also features a synth solo that timbrally emulates K.K. Slider, a troubador dog from the Animal Crossing franchise.
Smith gained a YouTube following in the tens-of-thousands in 2014 when he began producing Dive Time, a YouTube series in which he and his friends would scavenge dumpsters to find like-new video game products discarded by well-known retailers such as GameStop and Half Price Books.
Since then, Smith has transitioned to producing predominantly Pokémon-related content, specifically of the Shiny Hunting genre.
For the uninitiated, every wild Pokémon a player encounters has a 1 in 4096 chance (1 in 8192 on games released prior to 2013) of bearing with an alternate color scheme. Such Pokémon are termed Shiny due to the sparkling animation that plays when they appear, and are considered rare trophies by many players. Shiny Hunting involves purposely and repeatedly encountering Pokémon until a shiny one appears, often taking thousands of encounters and dozens of hours to do so.
Smith engages with this activity, not only as a form of leisure and content creation, but as an artistic practice in itself. This is due to his full-odds philosophy: the developers of the Pokémon games include various methods by which the player can increase their odds of finding a shiny in certain games. For Smith, however—as well as a large community of self-styled “full-odds hunters”—the value of the activity is in the search itself.
Much as the drip-paintings of Jackson Pollock are records, detemporalizations, physical castings, of the “dance” that was performed upon each canvas with body and brush, each of Smith’s resultant shiny Pokémon become imbued with the record of the journey upon which Smith and his community embarked to find them. To maximize the emotional and story-telling potency of those journeys, Smith eschews methods for increasing his chances of finding a shiny, content to preserve the rarity and uniqueness of his virtual quarry.
Cheers.
1 On Twitch, a “Raid” occurs when one streamer ends their stream by sending their viewers to another streamer’s stream, thereby sharing and mutually growing their communities. A “Raid Video” is a video a streamer plays when they receive a raid to give new incoming viewers a quick idea of what their content, their personality, and their community are all about.
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Lyrics by the Composer
Tales of Taylor, the creator; sit back, relax, and vibe.
Welcome raiders, epic gamers, realities collide.
Full-Odds hunter with a hunger and fortune of the gods!
Feel the thunder when you’re under, but don’t go over-odds!
Never gonna let impatience overtake us, baby:
We went 61236 for a Pidove!
I’d really like an Illumise. Maybe
We’ll find the shiny that we’re dreaming of!
Tales of Taylor, the creator; sit back, relax, and vibe.
Epic gamer, sure reclaimer of shinies that have flied.
Full-Odds hunter with a hunger and fortune of the gods!
Feel the thunder when you’re under, but don’t go over-odds!
[K.K. Slider Solo]
Friends until the end I know nothing can break us.
They’re our Pokémon and we’ll never let them down!
I’d really like an Illumise, baby!
We’ll keep on trying till we win the crown!
("When Taylor inverted his colors, the odds also inverted? Bahahah— Whoa what the hell!? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!??!??”)
Oh, Mylanta!
Tales of Taylor, the creator; sit back, relax, and vibe.
He became an epic gamer, so follow and subscribe!
Takes of Tyler! Feel the fire! We’re streaming with the squad!
Let the hunger drive your number, but don’t go over-odds.
Tales of Taylor, the creator; sit back, relax, and vibe.
Welcome raiders, epic gamers, realities collide.
Full-Odds hunter with a hunger and fortune of the gods!
Feel the thunder when you’re under, but don’t go over-odds!
