“Snake Oil / Tin Foil” (referred to here as just “Snake Oil”) is the third song off my “On the Air” EP, and the most lyrically dense. In my mind, both it and it’s intro “A Word From Our Sponsor (Power Grease)” are a fast talking satire of all the comedically performative toxic masculinity online; particularly from figures such as Andrew Tate or Clavicular. The song itself is supposed to give the impression of a carnival barker, or a sleazy fast talking salesman, standing uncomfortably close and pouring a miracle formula down your throat to ‘make you a man.’

 

The song itself started out in two separate pieces that came together pretty cleanly once I paired them up. The first part was a blues riff in E minor that I was playing around with in the spring of 2025, with the original intent of writing an instrumental. I had a brief period in the spring when I was listening to a lot of music I remember my dad listening to in the car—particularly Keb’ Mo’, Taj Mahal, and The Record Company, among other blues rock. So I wrote a couple little sketches for blues rock songs as an experiment, and out of all of them this was the riff that stuck in my head. (for reference, it was the riff played in the spaces between the chorus lines in “Snake Oil”).

 

The second part, the lyrics, actually evolved out of another song I was working on around the same time called “Holy Land USA”, which I later went back and finished. It’s about a string of unrelated, defunct Bible theme parks across the USA. I had made a number of sketches of the song, each with its own character, and only a few of which I was happy with. There was one sketch in particular that opened with:

 

 “Hey there you!

Mr. Well To Do

Are your spit shine shoes 

Feelin’ blue?”

 

I couldn’t get the rest of that sketch to work the way I wanted it to lyrically with the theme park idea, but I really liked that stanza in isolation. So, I repurposed it and tried writing a spin off, which poured its way out into becoming “Snake Oil”. The verses came together pretty much immediately (especially the second verse, which pokes fun at both the Trump sneakers announced the previous year). Additionally, I wrote what later became the fast talking bridge part as an unrelated section that sat off on its own for a while alongside the verse words. At the time I didn’t think it was useable for “Snake Oil” because it was at a significantly faster speed than the original song.

 

The most challenging part of “Snake Oil” was getting the choruses to work. I knew how the chorus was supposed to flow for the longest time, with the chords and rhythm pretty much set in stone from the start, but it took a long time for me to be happy with the lyrics. Because I often start gathering ideas to start a song by just doing a massive string of word association until I land on a few images I can build off of, I had one massive word document that I just kept adding and adding to, stringing different nonsensical sales pitches together constantly for a couple months until I found the ones that I finally went with for the song.

 

I’d share some of the scrapped versions if I could, but unfortunately I think I may have deleted the document the last time I did any digital housecleaning, because I couldn’t find it while going back through all of my notes.

 

The initial version of “Snake Oil” actually didn’t have a bridge. I had three verses and two choruses I liked, and I knew I wanted a bridge, but I didn’t have any parts that musically fit with the rest of the song’s instrumentation, and I didn’t have an ending. So, I sat down with O’ to record one time, played him what I had, showed him some of my scrapped sections, and then asked if he had any ideas. 

 

After we had figured out the instrumentation for the verses and choruses, O’ said “give me a couple minutes” and proceeded to write pretty much the entire bridge part based on the fragment I played him. The only thing I really did was tidy up my lyrics and then sing over it. The bridge was entirely his creation.

 

The recording process for Snake Oil went pretty smoothly from start to finish. We only recorded the song once, with some minor edits made later on in the process. The only big edit was re-recording one of the guitars from scratch because the original take was off tempo.

 

Art Design:

From the start I knew exactly what I wanted to do with “Snake Oil’”s single art. I wanted most of the frame to be dominated by a giant head with a grotesquely distorted (almost dislocated) jaw, extending outward to slobber up purple ooze either pouring in from offscreen, or from a bottle. Outside of that, the specifics were kind of up in the air. I didn’t know where to put the GYB logo in the image, I didn’t know what the bottle would look like, and I didn’t even know what the texture of the titular Snake Oil would be, so it took a lot of experimenting with the little details of the piece to get to the final design. There isn’t a lot to talk about specifically with all the different versions, as the entire process was just a lot of throwing darts at a map, so I’ll put a bunch of the different variations I made below for you to look at. I will say though that the final placement of the GYB came in because I wanted to try and line it up with the placement for “Dead Sound” and “The Masquerade”, to make the designs all come across as part of a set because they were all radically different to each other.