The Lost Tapes: “H.A.L.O.”

Nearly 15 years ago, Bungie, the developer of the first few Halo video games, ran a contest to win a Zune. (Side note: I loved Zune. The hardware was awesome, and I had much less trouble syncing my music in the Zune software compared to iTunes) The gist of it was to submit songs that were directly about or inspired by Halo, and I made and submitted a song for it called “H.A.L.O.” This is before Halo 3 came out, and I barely played Halo before Halo 3, to make that clear.

Anyway, I’d be lying if I said I totally forgot about the song I submitted for this contest; I think about it every so often. But I don’t remember the last time I actually listened to it. I didn’t even know if I had any of the stems lying around. Cut to a couple of days ago, and what do I find? The stems for my Halo song as well as various renders of the tracked song! Here’s the “mastered,” “CD quality” version. I imagine this is what I submitted to Bungie.

As we listen to it now, it’s laughable to me that I thought it was ready to be submitted for a contest. The vocals are particularly bad. But there is something special about it. It was recorded after I was done recording Boobs, Butts, and Feets and before I started working on Modus Operandi. That’s actually a pretty long span of time when I wasn’t recording a whole lot.

The synthesized guitars are the same ones (I think) that I used on “Release” and/or “Heavy Metal.” They’re obviously not real guitars, but I think they sound pretty cool. The drums are probably the standard setup that I used on Boobs, Butts, and Feets, and other than a couple quirks with them, I don’t think they’re half bad either. But yeah, those vocals. They’re all double-tracked, which sometimes is awesome, but when I’m not even singing the same lyrics during the second take…yeah…why would I leave it like that?

Lyrically, I kind of dig it! Again, I barely played Halo at the time of making the song. I might have played a beta of Halo 3, but I’m not sure. The words are silly, I don’t know what “Henry the 8th, I ain’t” is supposed to mean, but there’s a certain variation to the verses and other parts that I rarely implement in my songs. It’s like I’m learning from my own songs. It’s kind of neat.

Part of me wants to touch it up a bit and release it. I would definitely re-record the vocals, but other than that, I don’t know that I’d want to change it. Maybe figure out how to play the guitar parts on real guitar and put that in? We’ll see. Oh, and the intro was definitely “inspired” by the beginning of Hanzel und Gretyl’s “Fukken Uber Death Party.”

So this was a look at an old “forgotten” song of mine that few people have ever heard or even knew about. With Halo Infinite coming out later this year, I was inspired to do this. What did you think of “H.A.L.O?” Should I make posts about other old songs that I never officially released? Let me know in the comments here or on Twitter or whatever.