The following commentary is properly placed on this track's main release, Homestuck Vol. 8.

around 1/17/2012with respect to this album —
about 2 months, 23 days later captured 1/18/2012 Michael Guy Bowman ✑ Tumblr

Before going into a description of this track, I must make a long-overdue rebuttal to the factors that overshadowed its reception. Yes, I know this song and its track art pertain to the Wayward Vagabond. Yes, I know it's sad that Andrew "killed off" the Wayward Vagabond on the same day that this album was released. No, I had no idea that would happen nor do I care how incongruous the song's mood seems in relation to that particular plot point.

Anyway, now that I finally said my keep on that, "Escape Pod" was a really really fun track to do. It's a rock track with a feelgood video game attitude - I've heard it described as Sonic music a lot, though to be fair my main reference were Nintendo games, particularly Earthbound from which I borrowed the deliberately fake brass. It also shares some similarities with the Mario sound, kind of really owing to the competitive games such as Mario Kart and Mario Party.

The track also pulls a lot from actual rock music - the Roxy Music track "Street Life" was a big cue here, and the start-stop structure on the second chorus was really inspired by Tally Hall's track "Greener" of which the effect can only be described in exotic dance. I really wanted to pull out the stops on this one and make it catchy as hell, but apparently the two tracks book-ending it on Volume 8 steal its thunder.

What more can be said about it? This is about as totally poppy (or perhaps J-poppy) as I get. Compared to stuff like "Greenhouse" and "Squiddle Samba" this track is right up my alley. It in contrast with some of the other stuff that I've made appearing on the very same album (the minimalist piece "Gust of Heir" which I collaborated on with James Dever comes to mind) you'll see that I can go just as far in the saccharine direction as I can into the abstract. For me range has always been an asset I've felt was important to nurture, so with Volume 8 I set the pace for my work ethic on Ithaca in terms of never settling to have "found my sound" no matter how well any one idea works.

7/20/2024with respect to this album —
about 12 years, 9 months later Michael Guy Bowman ✑ Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text

God, I'm just looking at the list of stuff that was on that record. Escape Pod - with Homestuck Volume 8, it was almost like I, uh, said, you know, it's the eighth volume, so I'm going to write eight songs! (Caption in post: "I only got to 7")