King Arthur

King Arthur is a 50+ year old guy from Phoenix, Arizona, who came to songfight! to find out if he could still write (good) songs or not. Although he had the technical skills and playing chops, his writing and style seemed mired in the 1980s... as one early review commented, "if songfight had a strong over-50 voting contingent, you'd win every week." But they don't, and in time, he even had an award named after him: the "King Arthur Award," for the most fights entered without a win. King Arthur was the long-time leader for that award until the great "Prayer for Pancakes" friend flood. So it goes...

King Arthur was a one-man band, using multitrack recorders to create "band sound" songs. His early work was done on a Tascam 388 (8 tracks on 1/4" reel to reel tape) and then when he "went digital," it was on a Yamaha AW16G standalone workstation. As a former software engineer, he had very little faith in the trustworthiness of anything done on a computer. KA's greatest weakness was the regular use of a drum machine on his songs, along with his quirky "Arthurian" lyrics, which tended to resemble New Yorker short stories more than anything you might hear on the radio. KA was a frequent contributor to "hxaro" projects, where songfighters would cover songs by other songfighters (and he was the recipient of the very first Super Secret Hxaro Love Fest).

Although the text above is in mostly past tense, KA is still submitting occasional songs to songfight! as of May 2006, and will probably continue to do so as long as songfight! hosts the entries... a typically "Arthurian" song would be his take on "Toronto Star," and the song which is closest to who he is as a person is "High Enough."