Boil the Ocean: A Boardroom Pitch You Can Dance To

Track 7 of 11 on Wyrdz. 3:21. Electropop.

After I made a song out of lorem ipsum ("Dolor Sit Amet," the track before this one), I went poking around other filler text generators. There are dozens. Bacon ipsum. Pirate ipsum. And corporate ipsum, which produces endless paragraphs of business jargon for mocking up slide decks.

Reading it, I had an uncomfortable thought. Lorem ipsum is filler that nobody mistakes for meaning. Corporate filler gets read aloud in meetings, and people nod.

My company rarely has meetings and I don't normally attend meetings with clients... especially when it comes to either sales or marketing. Recently during a meeting to discuss design specs, some buzzwords were used and I honestly had to inquire as I require clarity in order to ensure that I understand and am on the same page. I believe that words have meaning and that the right words exist. As a result, I have a feeling that I would probably not survive many meetings where these are commonly used - or worse, I would create & use my own with the expectation that everyone would immediately understand and keep up.

The rule

Every line in this song is real business jargon, used straight. There are no invented buzzwords or exaggeration, because none were needed. "North star". "Buy-in". "Circle back". "Move the needle". "Close the loop". "Sunset". "Right-size". "Socialize the ask". "Take this offline". I have heard these spoken out loud by an adult with a straight face, and so have you.

The title is my favorite idiom in the whole canon. To "boil the ocean" means to take on something impossibly large. It's normally a warning: let's not boil the ocean here. My narrator has turned it into a battle cry. "So boil the ocean, drink it dry, and circle back on how and why."

He means it

The most important decision in the song is the point of view. The singer is a mid-level executive pitching a room, in the first person, and he is completely sincere. He built the deck at half past three. He blessed it with a north star claim. The room leaned in. He never tells a joke, because he doesn't know he is in one. The listener does all the laughing.

I think satire works better that way. A narrator who winks at you is asking for credit. This guy just wants the buy-in.

The engine of the song is the post-chorus, where a group chant throws buzzwords back at him like a congregation:

Leverage, bandwidth, pivot, scale Deep dive, deliver, land the whale

It is a list song hiding inside a dance song. The jargon piles up the same way it does in a real meeting, where nouns become verbs and nobody can stop it.

The sound

On paper this was initially going to be a late-seventies funk strut with clavinet and horn stabs. The take that actually made the album is electropop. I think the swap suits him. It is glossy, synthetic, and a little too sure of itself, which is roughly what a slide deck would sound like if it could sing.

Whatever the arrangement, the strut is what sells the self-importance, and I did not want the song to sneer. Most of us have been this guy for at least one meeting.

The fruit tree

Then the bridge pulls everything back and it stops rhyming, it is the only unrhymed section in the song, and the only place the mask slips:

Somewhere past the Q-four line a fruit tree hangs down low and heavy Nobody has picked it yet because picking isn't strategic

"Low-hanging fruit" is the one piece of jargon he never says. He describes it instead. For four lines he sees an actual tree with actual fruit on it, and notices that in all the talk about strategy, nobody has picked any. That is also the only negation in the entire lyric, and it is the punchline.

Then the chorus comes roaring back, bigger than before, and he has learned nothing. The song ends on a sudden stop and a deadpan "Let's take this one offline."

On the record

This track and "Dolor Sit Amet" are a deliberate pair: placeholder text, then corporate filler. Both songs are about language that takes up space without saying anything. The difference is what carries it. In "Dolor" the empty words are sung with full feeling and they break your heart. Here they are spoken with full authority and they win the room.

That is the title track's argument again, from the uncomfortable side. If words become things whether or not they mean anything, then a confident man with a deck full of nothing can still move a company. The needle moves, and the tree goes unpicked.

One practical note for anyone making music with Suno: "K-P-I" and "Q-four" needed to be hyphenated so they get sung as letters and not as one strange word.

The Video

I'm still learning so I changed up the process regarding the music video for this song. I took the apprach in the music video where every phrase happens as written. The Exec builds the deck, a plywood patio deck, on the conference room carpet at half past three. The stakeholders align in a line, holding sharpened stakes like a color guard. He boils the ocean on a camp stove the size of a pier and drinks it through a straw as tall as a flagpole. The crew circles back around the table on a painted path until they have worn a trench in the floor. A sewing needle the length of a canoe gets moved down a corridor on a hand truck with a WIDE LOAD flag. The whale gets landed on the loading dock with a rope. The plane gets landed too, with a hawk on its nose. Someone in the room is playing Boardroom Bingo the whole time, and the last shot shows the card, every square daubed.

In order to bring everyone up to speed, because not everyone has to deal with corporate jargon, I thought it'd be fun to have a VH1-like Pop-Up video. The words assemble on screen as they are sung, and a cream bubble at the bottom tells you what each piece of jargon actually means. "Land the whale: close one very large customer." Three rounds of bubbles run through the song: the meanings, then how a first-timer hears them ("Or: whaling."), then a few notes on how the song was made. A bingo card in the corner fills in square by square and goes full frame on "take it offline."

I created a song map with a 76-shot list with a still and motion note per shot, the bubble copy for the pop-up video and a budget. That document kept changing for two days, and it is the reason the work could be picked up after every interruption without re-deciding anything. In the end, 50 unique clips were used to cover 78 slots with some of the chant rounds being reused. Fifteen of the 50 shots needed to be re-rolled as the slop was too odd to include and ignore (vanishing apples, smoking the ocean instead of drinking, etc). The generated stills (OpenArt) and video (Atlas Cloud) cost less that $50 to produce overall.

In addition to using WhisperX to determine where each word landed in the video, I used a vocal-only audio MP3 and a MIDI file. The MIDI tempo map also gave a beat and bar grid, which is how the title card lands on a downbeat and the fruit drops on the 187.0 downbeat instead of near it. Remotion and DaVinvi Fusion were used for all text and the bingo card.

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
I built the deck at half past three
and blessed it with a north star claim
The room leaned in, they turned to me
I said the quiet part by name

[Pre-Chorus]
We ping, we touch, we sync
The stakeholders align
There's buy-in in the room
and everything is fine

[Chorus]
So boil the ocean, drink it dry
and circle back on how and why
We'll move the needle, close the loop
and land the plane in one swift swoop

[Post-Chorus]
Leverage, bandwidth, pivot, scale
Deep dive, deliver, land the whale
Leverage, bandwidth, pivot, scale
Deep dive, deliver, land the whale

[Verse 2]
The whiteboard bled from red to green
The K-P-I was climbing right
I sunset half of what I'd seen
and right-sized what was left in sight

[Pre-Chorus]
We ideate at pace
The runway's looking wide
I socialize the ask
and let the deck decide

[Chorus]
So boil the ocean, drink it dry
and circle back on how and why
We'll move the needle, close the loop
and land the plane in one swift swoop

[Post-Chorus]
Leverage, bandwidth, pivot, scale
Deep dive, deliver, land the whale
Leverage, bandwidth, pivot, scale
Deep dive, deliver, land the whale

[Bridge]
Somewhere past the Q-four line
a fruit tree hangs down low and heavy
Nobody has picked it yet
because picking isn't strategic

[Chorus]
So boil the ocean, drink it dry
and circle back on how and why
We'll move the needle, close the loop
and land the plane in one swift swoop

[Post-Chorus]
Leverage, bandwidth, pivot, scale
Deep dive, deliver, land the whale

[Outro]
Circle back, circle back
Let's take this one offline