Roscoe's Wetsuit

I transcribed the recipe from the poutine episode of Botched By Babish (and made some very basic edits/comments):

Ingredients

5 Yukon Gold potatoes

1 yellow onion, finely diced

3 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp poultry seasoning

6 Tbsp flour

I think you may actually want to start with 2 Tbsp and add 4 more later like they did in the video. I made it with 6 from the beginning and the butter totally dried up in the roux phase, and my gravy was maybe a tad thin.

2 cups chicken stock

2 cups beef stock

Andrew says “broth” in the video, but the recipe they show says stock and stock worked fine for me.

2 Tbsp soy sauce

3 Tbsp ketchup

2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1 tsp kosher salt

½ cup heavy cream

Real cheese curds

Method

Fries

Heavily salt pot of water and bring it to a boil.

Peel and cut potatoes into finger-sized fries.

Par boil until soft but not breakable. Lay out on a wire rack and put them in the fridge until cold.

Fry in canola 325-350 degrees F until golden brown.

Transfer to a rimmed baking sheet lined with paper towels. Finish with salt while the fries are still hot.

Gravy

Over medium heat melt 3 Tbsp butter in medium saucepot and cook onions until caramelised.

Add poultry seasoning & flour. Using spoon, stir occasionally for about 5 mins.

Whisk in 2 cups of chicken stock, beef stock, soy sauce, and ketchup.

Simmer until it begins to thicken, then add 100 grinds of pepper.

Add ½ cup of heavy cream to your gravy to make it velvety.

Strain gravy through a fine sieve to remove onion pieces.

Plating

Lately I’ve been obsessed with Charlie Puth’s Voicenotes. I can’t stop listening to it, but it has some problems holding it back from being a truly great album. Luckily, those problems can be easily fixed by the listener!

I’ve made some changes to this album to make it a much smoother package, and I’d like to share it in the hopes that more people can enjoy Voicenotes like I do.

First, I changed the name. Voicenotes is a terrible name for an album. It sounds dumb, and lots of artists write songs by recording voice memos. Charlie’s lyrics gave me plenty of good options for a new name, but I ultimately decided to just call it BOY. Aside from being the best song Charlie Puth has ever recorded, BOY is also a good thesis statement of Charlie’s belief that he’s a more talented artist than people make him out to be. It also wasn’t a single, and since Charlie has an affinity for the title, it seemed like a good title to pull for the album.

Next, I changed the cover. The Voicenotes cover is so bad and weird, and it doesn’t even look like Charlie. If I hadn’t seen it before I would never in a million years be able to tell you it’s a picture of him. The CD cover looks like a ripoff of Strange Desire, so I used another photo presumably from the same shoot as the final cover, and added the title and Atlantic Records logo. It’s not the best ever, but, like... anything is better than the real cover.

As for the actual content of the album, the first thing I did was straight-up delete two of the songs.

To me, If You Leave Me Now is completely unnecessary. While Charlie did a good job writing ‘80s-era harmonies, his original style is nowhere to be seen in this song, and I actually think it’s the song that clashes the hardest with the rest of the album.

I kind of feel bad taking it out because Charlie has continually said it’s the most important song he’s ever written, but Change is not something I ever need to listen to again. It’s supposedly a song about gun violence, but if anything it sounds to me like a song advocating for the rights of sexual minorities. That wouldn’t be a bad thing by itself, but it means either he took whatever generic world peace song he had lying around and claimed it was about school shootings when he was asked to perform at March For Our Lives, or that his alleged politics are what he really believes and he wrote a song about how we have over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings because we don’t love each other enough. This song sucks hard, and it sucks more the more you think about it.

My final problem with this album is that every track either directly contradicts the song that came before it, or the connection between them is so blatant it sounds like it was drawn by a three-year-old in magic marker. The final change I made was making serious changes to the track order. On BOY, there are only two instances of one track leading into the next the same way they do on Voicenotes. Here’s the new order:

The Way I Am - Charlie’s rocking declaration of self-worth remains in its original spot. It’s a fantastic opener.

LA Girls - I didn’t especially like Attention here because of how he says he’s always at a party in LA right after the last song where he sings about how he likes staying home. Plus, I want any new listeners who have only heard the singles to discover an awesome song right away!

How Long - This remains in its spot after LA Girls, no problems there. It’s a pretty good narrative pairing.

Attention - The vocal run at the beginning of Done for Me is way too similar to the background vocals in How Long to keep those songs together. Perhaps more important is breaking up Attention and LA Girls due to their incredibly similar guitar lines. However, I also made some edits to the song itself. I replaced the terrible-sounding breathy version of the pre-chorus with the one from the beginning of the song, and I took out the measure-long pause that kills all the momentum going into the end. I know, I know, Charlie’s emotion, but when the final chorus is closer to the actual music that precedes it, it’s easier to tell what’s different about it, and when Charlie’s voice comes out of nowhere it absolutely soars. You can hear this version of the song here.

Done for Me

BOY - On the original album, immediately following Done for Me is Patient and all its apologies. I know Done for Me is a little unrealistically boastful, but Charlie and Kehlani are too awesome to be undercut by Patient.

Somebody Told Me - Slow It Down is basically Charlie doing exactly what he complains about in BOY. If there’s a point to those two songs being together, I missed it.

Slow It Down - The same problem happens with Somebody Told Me→Empty Cups. Charlie sings about getting a girl to cheat on her boyfriend right after complaining about a girl cheating on him.

Patient - This is kind of the only place for this song to go after all the other edits, but I also like that one of the slower songs on this edit comes after Slow It Down (as is also true of the original album).

Empty Cups

Through It All - This song remains in its spot after Empty Cups and as the closer of the album. It’s a decent closer, but it sounds a lot more like Nine Track Mind than Voicenotes because it was the first song written for Voicenotes. I actually like this song, but I have to admit it’s lame as fuck and the lyrics sound very stupid coming from a 26-year-old. I really wanted to replace it with We Don’t Talk Anymore, arguably the only good song from Nine Track Mind and in my opinion more in the style of Voicenotes, but WDTA is in a compatible key with Empty Cups (too similar) and Nine Track Mind either put some filters on Charlie’s voice or was recorded with a worse microphone because his voice sounds noticeably more compressed. I also considered replacing it with In the Dark, but that song is lyrically identical to Empty Cups, and while it fills me with joy, it’s very silly, and since the point of this edit is to make the album more refined, it seemed counterintuitive. However, if you want to use In the Dark as a nostalgic closer that finally lets Charlie’s silliness bubble to the top, go ahead. Choose your own Charlie!

I hope you can appreciate this edit because it really helped me appreciate Voicenotes! This version of it is honestly one of my favorite albums ever and I’m really looking forward to Charlie’s next release. Thanks for reading!

Jeff: When we played Rec Room, we, I think we were lucky, I don't, maybe it's like this all the time, but we encountered a lot of other human beings who were down for it, who just like, fuck it, let's have a good time, like, let's fuckin' point weird guns at each other and have, tell goofy jokes and, some of them got off-color in a way that was like, a little disappointing, but fuckin' generally speaking, it was people being themselves and like, like having fun with it and being not super self-conscious.

Dan: Yeah, like you went behind the counter at like, basically like a, a YMCA, like, checking the counter.

Jeff: Yeah, you're, it's a locker room, it's like a boys and girls' club, it's like, hey, there are darts hanging out, and there's little cameras, and just like stuff you can fuck around with while you're waiting to play a game or doing whatever.

Dan: Yeah, so like, you went behind the counter, and, like, some, it sounded like a kid actually from the voice, came up and, like, rang the bell, and was like, "I'll have three darts please!" and you gave him, like, you threw them into his head at one point, and he left, and some other guy came up and you threw him a boombox, and he put it on his shoulder and started dancing around with it, and you took a confetti gun and shot confetti at him, and he dropped the boombox and acted like he was dead, and like, all these interactions were just like, this is amazing!

Jeff: Yeah, so, so, you know, you're seeing this body, you know, this, this disembodied flying body, like, go down on the ground, and then you realize, like, "Oh man, that person just laid down in their living room or wherever they are, because they're going for it!"

Dan: And they were dancing around with a fake boombox for a while.