Hear Lucy Dacus & Julien Baker Songs In Simlish
The Sims 4‘s new Cottage Living expansion pack, which introduces gameplay elements like farming and befriending animals, is pretty heavy on the indie rock. The expansion was announced with a trailer featuring Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee single “Be Sweet” sung entirely in Simlish, the long-running video game series’ in-universe gibberish language. And since Cottage Living‘s release yesterday, Simlish versions of Lucy Dacus’ Home Video cut “Hot & Heavy” and Julien Baker’s Little Oblivions track “Faith Healer,” which are both available on in-game radio stations, have popped up online — along with a full video for JBrekkie’s Simlish “Be Sweet.” Check out all of those below.
In an interview with Vice’s gaming vertical Waypoint, Japanese’s Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner discussed the process of recording the Simlish version of “Be Sweet”:
It was very funny, because I played The Sims a lot when I was a teenager especially and have sunk many hours of my life into creating various families. So to be singing one of my songs that still feels relatively new in a new language was really funny. It was very, very funny to hear the words altered in that way. It was difficult to get through takes without laughing, especially because “Be Sweet” has a lot of harmonies in it. So you’d have to layer them in all these different ways. It was just really a very funny, enjoyable process.
I was given the translation, but I thought that certain things are really funny. For instance, the first lyric of the song is like, “tell the men I’m coming.” And they translate men to Sim, which is pretty apt and funny. There were certain words like, “fweebin” for feelings, like my co-producer, Craig Hendricks, and I had started taking the words that we were learning from this song, and using them to express ourselves like, “how are you fweebin about that?” It was really a fun process.