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GAMESOVER

Can you write a whole song in pig latin?

Can you write a whole song in pig latin?

That was the entire starting point. I wasn't looking for a gag verse or a hidden line buried in the background vocals. I hoped that it would be pure, top to bottom, and still work as a song you would actually leave on until the end.

It turns out you can. This song is called "Alwaysway Isteninglay," which unscrambles to "Always Listening," and it's available on every streaming platform on August 21, 2026.

People have been doing this for a hundred years

Before I started I went looking to see who had already tried it, mostly to determine whether there was a good reason that nobody had. I found that plenty of people have used pig latin in a song, but almost nobody has used it for a whole song.

The oldest one I found is Arthur Fields singing "Pig Latin Love" in 1919, where the hook is "I-yay ove-lay ou-yay." A hundred and seven years old and the joke is still the joke.

In 1933, Ginger Rogers sang the third chorus of "We're in the Money" in pig latin in "Gold Diggers of 1933". My favorite part of that story is that she was goofing around in rehearsal and a studio executive overheard her. He liked it and told her to do it for real during filming. The best ideas are often an improvisation.

Merle Travis snuck it into the last line of "When My Baby Double Talks to Me," where he sung "baby" as "aybybay."

Lead Belly recorded a "Pig Latin Song" in 1948 for a children's record. He explains the rules in plain English first and then sings it, which makes him the only person on this list actually teaching you the language instead of showing off with it.

Bob Luman put out "The Pig Latin Song" as a single in 1961 on Warner Bros., backed with "The Great Snow Man." Rockabilly novelty, exactly as advertised.

Dolly Parton hid a real insult in "The Friendliest Enemy." Her sisters sang the background vocals in pig latin and she only admitted what they were saying decades later on Kelly Clarkson's show. She learned it at school and roped her sisters into it, which is the most Dolly explanation possible.

And more recently there's Teen Titans Go! and the "Obinray" sing-along, where the rest of the Titans finally teach Robin the language so they can talk about him in front of him.

What all of these have in common is that pig latin is used... a bit in a chorus, a tag line or a secret. It shows up, gets a laugh, and leaves. I could not find one where the language is simply the language the song is in, for three and a half straight minutes. So that became the thing I wanted to try.

Pig latin is not actually a "language". It's a language game or cant (ie, cryptolect, argot, pseudo-language, anti-language or secret language). It's also not specific to English as many other languages have their own variations.

The idea

The song is about being watched by your own government. It's not a protest and I'm not pretending it is. It's a joke with a nervous edge, which is roughly how I feel about the actual subject.

The premise is that if everything in your community, and even your house, is listening. To prevent being listened to, you can talk in a code you learned back in third grade. That's the whole conceit. It also doesn't work, because the machines caught up a long time ago, and that's what the last chorus of the video is about.

Eve is the character. Every single shot in the video is framed as though it came off surveillance equipment, so you never once see her from a camera that a human being is holding. (While creating the character resources, I had to provide the resource a name. I chose "Eve" as an homage to my all-time favorite Creator who used the same name for His first female.)

The lyrics

I wrote the direction and pushed Grok around until the words came out right. This is for an album I'm working on called "Werdz," which is turning into a collection of songs where the language itself is the gimmick, so a full pig latin track earned its slot.

There were two things that I did not expect.

The first is that pig latin rhymes too well. Nearly every word ends in "-ay," so everything rhymes with absolutely everything. This sounds like a gift, but it's actually a problem. When all your endings match, none of them land. You end up writing to the internal sounds and the rhythm instead, and letting the ends of lines take care of themselves.

The second is that pig latin is easy until it isn't. Consonant words are mechanical: "listening" loses its L, sticks it on the back with an "ay," and becomes "isteninglay." Words that start with a vowel are where people disagree. "Always" became "alwaysway." I picked whichever version I could sing and understand out loud, because a listener gets one pass at it and there's no rewind in a car.

The song

Suno generated the music. It took more than a dozen attempts to land the voice, and the voice was the whole ballgame.

Too winking and it's a novelty song over in a single listen. If it's too straight, the joke never registers. What finally worked was a singer who sounds like she has no idea she's speaking in code, delivering it completely sincerely, which makes it much funnier and slightly creepier at the same time. Once that clicked, the rest of the track fell into place fast.

The music video

I've made lyric videos before with generated footage, but this is my first one with a real character, an actual lip sync, a color grade, and an effects layer on top. It took 3 days of work and 34 separate clips.

The rule that saved it and made it affordable was using only one tool to draw Eve's face while she was singing. Everything else got the shots where you couldn't identify anyone anyway. Thermal, night vision, satellite, a drone two hundred feet up, a ceiling dome in a parking garage. That one rule is why she looks like the same woman for the entire runtime even though two completely unrelated AI platforms generated the footage.

The other thing that pulled it together was color. Two generators do not look exactly alike out of the box. No amount of fussing over individual shots fixes that. One color treatment was applied to all 34 clips. Adding teal in the shadows and amber in the highlights did more than everything else combined.

If you catch the numbers 2600 or 42 on any of the screens, those are on purpose as Easter eggs. (Consider it a small reward for watching closely.)

The lyric video

The lyric video is the version I'm most attached to, and it's the one thing here I haven't seen anyone else do yet.

The words arrive on screen in pig latin exactly the way that you hear them. Then, as the line plays, the letters physically crawl back to where they belong and the word turns into English in front of you. The L slides off the end of "isteninglay" and walks back to the front, and it says "listening." The entire lyric layer was generated locally on my PC using Remotion and WhisperX-timed word data.

This approach enables viewers to read the song while it decodes itself. It's the closest I could get to putting the experience of finally hearing what someone is saying into a picture.

Listen and watch

The song is on its own page here, and you can pre-save it for August 21 on every platform at once.

Follow for more at YouTube and Facebook.

If you want the unglamorous version of how the video actually got built, including what broke and what it cost, I wrote that up separately for the programmers on my myCFML blog: "Making a Music Video Using AI Tools". It's a different kind of horror story.