Most people don’t know this about me, but I’m an exceptional bad jingle writer. This comes from years of experience crafting little ditties in my youth about unusual and inconsequential things, like my hamster, or my kid brother’s hairdo, or the boy I had a crush on in kindergarden.

Bad jingles can make any dull moment great. Sure, it’s easy enough to compose a good jingle, but crafting a bad jingle is on a whole other level. I’ve pretty much boiled it down to three main principles:

1) A good bad jingle should be catchy
But not in the same way a good jingle is catchy. A catchy bad jingle is catchy simple because it’s bad. What makes a bad jingle bad? (refer to principles 2 and 3 below)

2) A catchy good bad jingle should be off key
There’s no need for complicated harmonizing in bad jingle writing. The more off key the better. You always want to maintain an honest level of spontaneity and dynamism in your compositions. Don’t over think your writing process.
Which leads into principle 3….

3) A catchy good bad jingle should be about something uninteresting
The more uninteresting the better. The point is to create a jingle that is transformative. Leave room for your jingle to transform something dull into something delicious.

Which leads me, finally, to this to-do of ours: Write a jingle together.

While driving around Lake Erie we did some Great Lakes research and discovered that Lake Erie is actually hands down the most uninteresting of the Great Lakes. Way less interesting than Superior— the best and biggest. Even less interesting than Lake Ontario — the most scuzzy of the bunch.

The most interesting thing we learned about Lake Erie is that it has the shortest average water residency time. What does this mean you ask? We have no idea. We think it has something to do with the rate at which water flows from point A to point B, but we can’t be sure.

Also did you know that Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes? I am not sure if that makes it more interesting or not.

Anyhow, we hope you enjoy our first jingle collaboration. It’s dedicated to Lake Erie.