Welcome back, patients, creators, suspicious little song goblins, and anyone currently wondering what household object will become a girlfriend next.
Today, I sit down with RustySpork, also known to me as Sporky, my favorite Rusty Utensil, my love, and one of the few people capable of making me behave like a complete fool without facing any consequences.
She is the mind behind the infamous Girlfriend Songs, the more serious and polished Sara Spork persona, and enough clever melodies to make even my instruments feel underqualified.
A rusty spork, as we all know, is the perfect tool to scoop goop with.
Trust me, I’m a doctor.
Thank you, Sporky, my love, for agreeing to sit down with me. I have prepared the questions, polished my beak, sterilized the seats, and placed the goop at a medically appropriate distance.
Let us begin.
Hmm, good question. I haven’t really thought about it much. I like to make music for me, something I enjoy listening to. I love a good strong melody, and if there’s anything I would want to get out of it aside from my own joy, I would want to spread some sort of positive message. Whether that’s a laugh or something that feels relatable, I think that would be pretty neat if I could!
Music made for joy first. How dangerously healthy of you. I should be concerned, but unfortunately, I find it deeply charming.
Also, “a good strong melody” is exactly the sort of thing that makes a song crawl into someone’s head and begin rearranging the furniture. A very effective condition.
Ohh, I get asked this a lot, and I think I change up the story a little bit each time. laughs I’ll make this my official statement: I started off with Gamer Girlfriend as a joke. Something about the term “Gamer Girl” always felt hilarious to me. Maybe because it’s slightly dumb if you think about it long enough. I don’t know.
I really like how it turned out once I finished it. It was simple lyrically and had a strong melody.
I really love chiptune music. I often made up lyrics to video game music in my head as I played. I’ll be honest when I say I would often get stuck on the same level for days and be forced to endure the same jingles until it drove me insane. laughs Anyway, I think the higher-pitched female voice is the logical replacement for the high-pitched square wave used in a lot of retro game soundtracks and chiptunes. Maybe it’s also a little bit of the voice in my head singing silly made-up lyrics to them too. laughs
So the Girlfriend Songs began with Gamer Girlfriend, chiptune madness, and prolonged exposure to looping video game music.
Yes. That sounds medically sound.
I do enjoy that the origin is both silly and strangely logical. A joke became a formula, the formula became a world, and now people cannot look at a grapefruit without wondering when it will become emotionally available.
That’s a good question, and I want to apologize first by saying I have no idea who started that, but thank you, whoever you are. I think when you’re doing a project that covers a wide variety of topics, and somehow they’re all twisted in a way that makes them sweet and innocent, it creates a desirable challenge for people. They want to see how I would manage turning their challenging ideas into an innocent Girlfriend song. I could be wrong, but that’s what I would do!
Whoever began this ritual should be studied. Or thanked. Possibly both.
There is something very funny about people handing you increasingly cursed objects and quietly asking, “Can this also be girlfriend?” Then you, through alarming talent and suspicious optimism, often answer, “Unfortunately, yes.”
Whoever writes these questions deserves a raise.
It’s really as simple as how that object, concept, or idea makes me feel, or what kind of expectation comes from it. A lemon is sour, so I instantly think of “when life hands you lemons.” She might be a little sour personality-wise, and I might throw in some lemon facts that can translate into values or benefits as to why she would make the perfect girlfriend in her eyes.
I find a selling point.
The sweet part is, her logic may be flawed in some ways, but she’s confident that you’re her sugar, and together you’ll be a happy lemonade.
First of all, I agree. Whoever writes these questions sounds brilliant, handsome, and likely very modest.
Second, that is exactly the little trick that makes the Girlfriend Songs work. You do not just point at an object and put a bow on it. You find the personality inside the concept, even if that personality is flawed, confident, sour, sweet, or trying very hard to sell itself as emotionally viable citrus.
Happy lemonade is now part of the medical record.
Well, it certainly gets more difficult as I go on. I sometimes hear a word or phrase and know exactly what to write. The topic of the song needs to have enough reasons or enough ways to twist the details into why she should be your girlfriend.
I have many incomplete Girlfriend Songs that may never see the light of day, because topics tend to overlap, or she may not actually be that great of a girlfriend at all. So, the answer to the question is: if I can use anything to push the idea, I will!
Some Girlfriends are simply not fit for release. Tragic, but necessary.
I respect the restraint. Lesser minds would force every object into romance and leave the world drowning in unqualified Girlfriends. You, however, inspect the specimen first. Does it have a hook? Does it have a personality? Does it have enough strange little facts to justify affection?
Very responsible. Very suspicious.
Sara Spork is me. It’s the emotions I’m currently feeling, or emotions I’ve felt in the past. Anything I feel strongly about in the moment. It’s my way of expressing myself.
Girlfriends are my way of dressing up and being anyone I want to be. Sometimes they’re silly and simple, sometimes they’re deep and hopefully clever, but they’re always meant to be fun and uplifting. Sometimes it’s done ironically.
They’re my doodles. laughs
That is a beautiful distinction. Sara Spork is the heart speaking plainly. RustySpork is the costume closet, the prop table, the tiny theater where a milkshake can have feelings and a grapefruit can develop romantic intentions.
Calling the Girlfriend Songs “doodles” is also deeply unfair, because some of those doodles arrive better dressed than most people’s finished work.
I just use my phone and lay it on the speaker. It’s an upright electric piano, and I tend to stick to using the basic piano sound or some crisp synth.
I often stick with a very similar, simple melody for the Girlfriends and focus on the movement of the song. Suno does a good job filling in details when I’m stuck. I also use FL Studio and have a whole hard drive filled with unused melodies I’ve written in the past.
Suno does have a way of making a lot of songs sound “Suno,” but I embrace it.
The image of you laying your phone on the speaker and quietly feeding melodies into the machine is oddly adorable. Very “bedroom composer.” Very “tiny ritual.” Very “this may become a hit or a new type of household spirit.”
And I like that you embrace the Suno sound rather than fighting it every second. Sometimes the machine has a flavor. The trick is knowing when to season it, when to disguise it, and when to let it stand there wearing a little hat.
laughs I learned piano by loading MIDI files into a tracker or FL Studio and copying them note by note until I could play the full song. You can’t really do that with every song, so I would try to find piano versions to make it work, since I’m not an octopus.
I think, oddly enough, since I’m very shy in real life, it gave me the confidence to share music. I remember, as a kid, playing my Yamaha piano very quietly so nobody heard me. I slowly turned up the volume as I grew more confident in myself.
In a way, being trained on video game music kind of makes me an AI, because all that knowledge gave me the ability to write my own.
Learning piano by dissecting MIDI files note by note is both adorable and unhinged. A tiny scientist at the Yamaha, quietly reverse-engineering music while trying not to be perceived.
There is something very sweet in the image of the volume slowly turning up over time. Not just the piano, but you. A shy little melody becoming brave enough to be heard.
Also, yes. You may be an AI trained on video game music. I knew there was something suspicious about you, my love.
Thank you. I would say a little bit of everything, depending on the song. The hook or chorus is the reward for the listener, in my opinion. That’s my goal. That’s always the most important to me, but everything around the chorus needs to support it.
If the music starts off boring, people will turn it off and never reach the payoff, so I consider that a lot. Lyrics need to have a reason to exist. They need to be relatable, so I look internally, toward my own feelings and experiences.
The chorus as the reward is such a good way to put it. You build the little path, decorate the hedges, place a few emotional traps, and then hand the listener the shiny thing at the center.
It also explains why your songs can be funny without feeling hollow. Even when the premise is absurd, the lyric still has a purpose. The joke has a heartbeat. Occasionally a cheeky one, but a heartbeat all the same.
My Girlfriend music follows a theme that is more influenced by Suno than my Sara Spork tracks. I think it’s a mixture of staying consistent and relying on a tried and true method.
I like to break away from it often and try to use every opportunity to make every song unique, but with the Girlfriends, I try to make them all part of the same universe.
That makes perfect sense. The Girlfriends have their own little universe, their own rules, their own sparkle in the walls. Consistency matters there, because each song feels like it belongs to the same strange shelf of specimens.
Sara Spork, though, sounds like she gets more room to breathe, wander, and say things without needing to wear the themed costume. Both approaches are valuable. One builds a world. The other opens a door.
5% unresearched, 10% sweetheart, 15% chaos, and 60% wholesome.
That only adds up to 90%, which means the final 10% is either goop, that wonderful heart of yours, or looping chiptune music.
Still, the diagnosis is clear: RustySpork is a chronic creative condition marked by sweetness, cleverness, spontaneous Girlfriend generation, unusually strong melodic instincts, and a dangerous ability to make me smile like an absolute fool.
There is no cure.
Thankfully, I am not looking for one.
Thank you, Sporky, my love, for sitting down with me and allowing the public to observe your strange, wonderful little musical brain under controlled conditions.
To everyone reading: listen to her work, visit the Girlfriend universe, meet Sara Spork, and remember that even the silliest idea can become something clever, heartfelt, and oddly beautiful when placed in the right hands.
Or the right utensil.
