Wow. A thread that goes back some nine years. And I replying to it... oh, well. So, my take on the song is very different...
I think Cake it taking a swipe at people who call themselves songwriters, but can't come up with something original and resort to "sampling" older songs. Sampling is a word and "artists" use when they don't want to be called plagiarizers. Back when this song was written, sampling was becoming quite a fad, especially in pop and rap.
Mr. Mastodon Farm is the plagiarizer... I mean "song writer" who finds an "old" song that he (or she) "samples" and makes part of the "new" song. So, Mr. Mastodon Farm is "cutting swatches" out of all (of the old) material that's out there.
So what does this have to do with birds falling by my window? Well, using the "industry's" term, when a new song or album is released, it "drops". So here we have, figuratively, the writer of the original song, watching a new song drop, like stones, or small loaves of bread. And it annoys the heck out of him that some mindless-drivel-pop-music-songwriter has sampled his (or someone else's) song hoping to make money off of it - hence his contempt for Mr. Mastodon Farm. But, being a songwriter, he has to know if the song makes it, or takes flight. So he is compelled to keep an eye on it - to see if it makes that curve to a "horizontal flight". And, knowing that the song is actually his creation, he will feel like a failure unless this song also makes it, thereby, vindicating him and his writing.
Wow. A thread that goes back some nine years. And I replying to it... oh, well. So, my take on the song is very different...
I think Cake it taking a swipe at people who call themselves songwriters, but can't come up with something original and resort to "sampling" older songs. Sampling is a word and "artists" use when they don't want to be called plagiarizers. Back when this song was written, sampling was becoming quite a fad, especially in pop and rap.
Mr. Mastodon Farm is the plagiarizer... I mean "song writer" who finds an "old" song that he (or she) "samples" and makes part of the "new" song. So, Mr. Mastodon Farm is "cutting swatches" out of all (of the old) material that's out there.
So what does this have to do with birds falling by my window? Well, using the "industry's" term, when a new song or album is released, it "drops". So here we have, figuratively, the writer of the original song, watching a new song drop, like stones, or small loaves of bread. And it annoys the heck out of him that some mindless-drivel-pop-music-songwriter has sampled his (or someone else's) song hoping to make money off of it - hence his contempt for Mr. Mastodon Farm. But, being a songwriter, he has to know if the song makes it, or takes flight. So he is compelled to keep an eye on it - to see if it makes that curve to a "horizontal flight". And, knowing that the song is actually his creation, he will feel like a failure unless this song also makes it, thereby, vindicating him and his writing.