Alarm Code As Songwriting Prompt (Or How I Wrote Colosseums)

Or 'in defense of the instrumental version'

People seem to like the crazy tale of how I wrote ‘The Laws Have Changed’ so I thought “Do I have anymore strange tales of unlikely inspiration?”. It made me think of the song ‘Colosseums’ from Whiteout Conditions. Sure, it’s not the most popular song from one of our biggest records but they can’t all be, right?

Our house came with a built in security system. I’m not sure if they make any difference. They serve the purpose of making us feel safe, that’s important. I believe they talk about this in the film ‘The Purge’ (coming soon to reality). Every night I punch in the code. It sounds like this:

It’s got an odd jaunty little melody to it. 2 notes. F and C. After a while, it gets tattooed onto your consciousness. Day in, day out. One day I decided that I should try to turn it into a song. Needed to be cleaned up though, put in time. Like so:

Next, I needed a song. I had the beeping. That was 50% of the work. I started playing with chords underneath it. Found something that worked. Next I had to write a chorus. The usual stuff. I had to transpose the alarm code up a step, since I changed the key, and eventually removed the beeping with vocals singing the same melody, but it still works inside the song rhythmically. I just made this instrumental remix to illustrate. Check it out: