The three-volume soundtrack to Homestar Runner is even more “fans only” than Strong Bad Sings. So I’m probably being too kind to it as stand-alone music, but I can’t help but enjoy it.

There are just a ton of tracks, 60 tracks in each volume, for a total of 180. The vast majority of them are cues and song-fragments, so it’s really hard to imagine anyone who is not a fan enjoying anything other than the share actual songs. (For example, they collect all the SBEmail snippets into three tracks, which is likely extremely confusing to anyone who doesn’t know the bit.) It’s also worth noting that not all of the songs from Strong Bad Sings are here, I guess because a few of those were recorded for that album, and not for the series. (Just guessing.) Also, occasionally the sound quality isn’t amazing, which I guess comes from pulling tracks from audio files made in the early aughts.

But I still find this stuff delightful. There’s the usual mix of excellent parodies and outright absurdity (leaning towards parody for anything fleshed out) and the little musical interludes that are not obviously parodies or really stupid are musical enough to be pleasant. Yes, it helps to know the characters for the fragments in particular, but I feel like there are enough jokes (absurdist humour, musical humour or more traditional jokes) to make most of them work.

Certainly there are more cues that are not jokes that you could criticize them, if it wasn’t literally the soundtrack to the series. But I do think they’re all pleasant enough.

All these years later I remain utterly charmed by this show’s music. I can’t help myself. I understand it’s probably not your thing if you have never seen the show, especially when the best full songs are so spread out among 180 tracks, but I just can’t help enjoying it immensely.