This song is another blast from my significantly less-polished musical past. As the title suggests, I was quite bored, and this is off the top of my head, stone-cold sober freestyling using an instrumental downloaded off of LimeWire™ (may the good Lord rest their soul). The instrumental is the instrumental for Mario's song "Let Me Love You (Remix feat. Jadakiss and T.I.)". My vocals for "Bored Up in This Room" were recorded via my MacBook's built-in microphone in my dorm room in the Berklee College of Music dorms on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, MA, when I was staying there for the 2007 Five Week Summer Performance Program when I was 16 and was disillusioned with the program because of all the obsessive emphasis on technical virtuosity and my feelings of inadequacy in light of that. In retrospect I should've done the program with voice as my primary instrument instead of guitar, since it seemed like everyone else there for guitar was shredding up a storm while I at that time mostly just liked playing chords while I sang. But I didn't know what I didn't know, and hindsight is always 20/20. For some reason I made my vocals sound somewhat like they were coming in over a telephone or weirdly compressed or filtered in some way, I think wanting to make sure that my voice could be heard over the beat. When I was recording this I was occasionally wary of the possibility of my two roommates coming in and hearing me, since I had headphones on while recording so I could hear the beat and it wouldn't be playing in the background of the vocals like in some of my other lesser recording setups. So anytime I thought I heard thumping or noise that wasn't coming in over my headphones I would think they were about to open the door and come into the room, and I would briefly get all quiet and embarrassed. This song was originally uploaded to my SoundClick page at www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=541671&content=music&songcount=107&offset=0&currentPage=2 on Wednesday 9/26/2007 and was listed as part of my "Blunt Juice" album, before it was later included on this album, Refinery. I think I had originally intended for it to be on "Blunt Juice - Disc 1", since I hadn't yet decided at that point to make it a double-disc album, which didn't end up panning out anyway due to me being busy with school at Sturgis Charter Public School in Hyannis, MA, United States and with other musical projects. So by the time this was released on my album Refinery it was almost four years old. The artwork for this song is a very dim and low-resolution picture taken on the evening of Tuesday 9/11/2007 of my friends Jocelyn Laurie (right, 17) and Amber Scanlan (left, 17) with Jocelyn sitting on the edge of the passenger side window and Amber with the driver's side door open, showing how we had jimmy-rigged (or fixed in a makeshift way) Amber's windshield wipers since it was raining and they weren't working. We did it by tying shoelaces together and tying one two big strings of shoelaces tied together to the windshield wiper, so it could be pulled back and forth across the windshield manually through the cracked open driver and passenger side windows by the driver and passenger. True to form, there are a number of references and notable meanings in the lyrics which I will explain here. The lyric “biting the rye like Madonna” is actually a reference to the lyric “Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye” from Don McLean’s classic song “American Pie” off of his 1971 album American Pie. However, because I was born in 1991, my first encounter with this song was when Madonna released a cover version of it in March 2000 to promote the soundtrack of her film The Next Best Thing (2000), on which it was featured. My lyric “I don’t care, even if it is cliché I will rap the muthafuckin’ way that I want” is there because for a long time I felt that there was a perception that local rappers are supposed to not emulate the commercial rap on the radio, but rather manufacture a pretentious “socially conscious” lyrical point of view in order to boost their credibility among other local rappers. I didn’t really give too much thought to that idea, I just made the music I wanted to make. The lyric “I’m like, w-whatever that girl’s name was, the one who showed Amber that CD/Ain’t No Other Crystal”, I’m referring to a girl that came into my late friend Amber Scanlan’s work when she worked at Papa Gino’s in 2006 back when they had one at the Falmouth Mall. Her name was Crystal and she was a local female rapper who knew Amber and she gave her a burned copy of her latest CD/mixtape entitled Ain’t No Other, which Amber and I listened to. The phrase “Merry Crystal Methmas” is a direct quote from Debra Wilson portraying Whitney Houston in a famous late 2002 Mad TV skit parodying her iconic Wednesday 12/4/2002 ABC Primetime interview with Diane Sawyer. The lyric “smokin’ creeks in the dark/lookin’ like Princess Superstar” is a reference to a lyric in Princess Superstar’s song Dichotomy off of her 2001 album Princess Superstar Is, in which she says “I'm a narc smokin’ trees in the dark part of the car park”. “Trees” as most people know, is a slang term for cannabis. The lyric “eatin’ a turd like a muthafuckin’ jit chink” is referring to how it seemed like everytime I stumbled upon the crazy smutty extreme side of the internet, it seemed like there was an overabundance of Asians (particularly the Japanese) on porn sites depicting coprophilia, also known as scat. It also seemed like they were about tied with Germans and central Europeans with regard to their representation in this genre of porn, and maybe they still are. Why this is the case and why this fixation seems to exist, has been the subject of a lot of articles and online discussion, often delving into culture and history, etc. But that is beyond the scope of this song description. The lyric “hope my roommates don’t come in the room ageen/“ was just me once again self-consciously worrying aloud that my roommates would come into the room and catch me recording and I would be embarassed. I also took liberties with the pronunciation of the word “again” in that line, just so it would rhyme. References to the South (the Southern United States of America, that is) reflect my ongoing interest at that time in Southern and Dirty South Hip-Hop/Rap music, particularly by female rappers. This was in spite of this unspoken sense that I was supposed to only like Jay Z and Nas and other comparatively buttoned-up, relatively non-ratchet East Coast/Northeast/socially conscious Hip-Hop/Rap artists, even though Southern and Dirty South Hip-Hop/Rap music was what was blowing up on top 40 radio at the time with seemingly endless club bangers. I then try to lead into this barely-there hook by ending my first verse with “and the hook goes…” as I think I had heard some artists do that. The chorus once again references my fear of being walked in on by my roommates. The lyric “Yeah, I’m a bad ass mutha wit a big fat rag/got these niggas…while I toss it up/“ is influenced and partially lifted from Dirty South Divas’ song “Look Back at It”. Dirty South Divas were also known as DSD, and they worked with Khia and appeared on her 2002 debut album Thug Misses. I now think that rather than strictly “corny”, as I described them and Khia, a term that Amber Scanlan and I used to apply liberally in describing almost anything funny or otherwise, I would describe their sound as female Southern/Dirty South Hip-Hop/Rap music with vocals so dripping in Southern drawl that they border on camp, and to the extent that they sometimes even surpass Khia in this department. I am also a huge fan of Khia despite her blocking me on Twitter, where her account is @QueenKhia, and I will continue to support her music and career. The lines where I mention Johnny Cash and Eighty-Six are sort of me sticking it to the heteropatriarchical male rock establishment, who I might’ve felt alienated from and vaguely oppressed by. Johnny Cash, however, was a world-famous country music legend, while Eighty-Six was just a local rock band from the Woods Hole, MA and Falmouth, MA area that I got the sense were worshipped by the sprinkling of local white indie kids and bros in the area. This of course probably made me feel threatened or resentful in some way, which probably led to me referencing them in this song. It was probably also just the general kind of 2000’s Eminem-esque lyrical aesthetic where you namedrop random celebrities and public figures and make incendiary quips about them. I mention Eiffel 65 after I mention the word blue, in reference to their 1999-2000 eurodance hit single “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” and I say “like it’s 2000 all over again” because that’s when I remember that song being popular. When I follow “wen Stefani is so hotty and the chronny in the body, dot a little little lotty/“ with “and I already said that in one of my other songs, B”, I’m referring to how I used a very similar line in a previous, similarly low-budget Hip-Hop/Rap song I did called “Number of Minutes”, which I think was originally released on my SoundClick page at www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=541671&content=music&songcount=107&offset=0&currentPage=2 on Wednesday 9/26/2007 as part of my album Blunt Juice. I don’t think it has since been released on Bandcamp, but I will change that soon. In that song I also used the line “and the hook goes…”. The line “but I really don’t care and really don’t care if you try to mention me/“ could be a reference to an Eminem lyric with the phrase “mention me”, from his song “Without Me” off of his album The Eminem Show. The line “I just chill smoke and roll through the hood” is a quote from the lyrics to Khia’s song “I’ve Been High” off of her 2006 sophomore album Gangstress. I mention the book “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Tracy Chevalier because I was reading it for my summer reading for going into my junior year at Sturgis Charter Public School in Hyannis, MA for the 2007-2008 academic year. The line “I keep goin’ back to the grindy voice like Marilyn Manson/“ refers to how I sometimes have had a tendency, especially back when this was recorded, to have my rapping revert back into this really guttural and heavily vocal-fried voice. I can’t really put my finger on a specific artist it is influenced by, but I guess it’s sort of vaguely scurrilous, confrontational and bawdy. The mention of Marilyn Manson is because I noticed sometimes his vocals have that gritty vocal fry quality to them, from what I had heard from Amber Scanlan playing me some of his songs on her burned mix CDs. The lyric “don’t leave me there when I’m drunk, though” sounds like it could be in reference to one of my first big alcoholic jackpots I had in August 2007 when Me, Amber Scanlan, Kaeli Conley and a bunch of other people were chilling outside Kaeli’s house in East Falmouth, MA and I got way too drunk and ended up in the hospital after they left me on Kaeli’s lawn. But since I think this was recorded in July or at some time in August before that incident, I’m not 100% sure what that line is referencing, unless it was recorded during like the last few days of my time at Berklee College of Music’s 2007 Five Week Summer Performance Program, and after that had happened. But I thought that that incident happened after my last concert of the program, but maybe it was at the end of the last full week, followed after the weekend by the short few remaining days of concerts. I described the incident in much more detail at the time on my LiveJournal, and my father Matthew Walton did, to a lesser extent, in his diary. The lyric “Make you meet me” could’ve been a subconscious reference to Björk’s line “Make them leave me nature” in her song “Vertebræ by Vertebræ” off of her 2007 album Volta, which I think I misheard as “Make them meet me nature", like with her speaking from the point of view of nature personified.