Ain't Locked Till It Runs
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Stripped it to the bone, took every key it had
Tested on the fat one, shipped the lean one, mean and bad
Pulled the compiler out, it got no business there
Dropped every right that box was ever gonna wear
Wrote it on a page and I swore the thing was set
Signed it with a grin, ain't nobody run it yet
Ain't locked till it runs! (Ain't locked till it runs!)
A padlock on paper never stopped anyone
Bolt it down tight, then kick it till it's done
Ain't locked till it runs! (Ain't locked till it runs!)
Rolled it out on Friday and every light went red
Three fires burnin', not the one I had in my head
The lean one went lookin' for the tools I left behind
Two borrowed engines wanted keys I never signed
Didn't tear it all down, didn't panic, didn't guess
Read each wreck by its own name and cleaned up every mess
Ain't locked till it runs! (Ain't locked till it runs!)
A padlock on paper never stopped anyone
Bolt it down tight, then kick it till it's done
Ain't locked till it runs! (Ain't locked till it runs!)
Crash it in the garage on a Tuesday night
Costs you a bruise while the stakes are light
Every wreck's a line that you forgot to write
Hand back three keys, keep the rest locked tight
Ain't locked till it runs!
Ain't locked till it runs!
I never ran it once
Now the poor kid on call finds out at half past one
The band
Highway to Prod
Two bars of unaccompanied riff, then the whole pub: open-chord crunch, the snare hard on two and four, and a high rasped howl that spends the chorus flat out at the top of its range. Half late-seventies bar-room stomp, half Sunset Strip sleaze, with a screaming lead break in the middle. Boasts about the reckless thing it did on purpose, and never once sounds sorry about it.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post Hardening Is Only A Claim Until You Deploy It.
A locked-down, production-shaped build is a set of assumptions until it has actually run, so rehearse the real thing early and treat each crash as a missing line in your own documentation.