Mr. Softy's Balloon Race

Mr. Softy's Balloon Race is a Gorillaz song which used to be available on the Kong Studios website during Phase Two. The recording could be found in the form of a 12-inch record at Russel's Room on the Gorillaz Room game and played on his record player. The song, similar to another website-exclusive track from the time, "Mix 2", has never been released outside of Gorillaz.com.

The song of a percussive drum machine loop, a simple synthesizer riff as the song's main beat and lyrics by 2-D, with him also humming in the background. No other band member is featured on the song.

Recording and Information
Mr. Softy's Balloon Race was recorded during the early stages of Phase Two, from when the album Demon Days was still called "Reject False Icons" and used most of its elements from the scrapped Gorillaz movie "Celebrity Harvest" It was written for Russel by 2-D, who thought he always looked depressed, and to help him cheer up after Del was reaped from his body by The Grim Reaper during the hiatus between the phases.

On the book Rise of the Ogre, Russel mentions how much of a nightmarish experience was seeing The Grim Reaper face to face for the second time, and Del's goodbye speech to him: "(Del The Ghost Rapper) turned to me, the look on his face I'll never forget, and then he sort of looked down, and just said, 'I gotta go. I knew that sooner or later he'd come. Y'know, you can't hide from him forever'. Del had taken refuge inside me since he died in the drive-by shooting. But it was now time for him to go to his proper resting place. He gave me one last hug and then that was it. The Reaper wrapped his cloak around Del, and then they were both gone."undefined He becomes extremely anxious and almost freaks out when telling Murdoc the story, and then shows him a picture with a fan from the exact moment of the event, leading Murdoc to go pale.

2-D knew that Russel was having difficulty fully recovering from the experience and was taking lots of medication even after he'd already gone back to Kong Studios when the band reunited, which led him to write the song both as a way to properly say goodbye to Del, on a happy way, but also to comfort Russel, who then kept the record for it on his room in Kong Studios, at the same place where the Beat Box Bandit Remix of "Rock The House", a Gorillaz single featuring Del the Ghost Rapper, used to be played. This could be one of the main reasons why the song was also never released as a B-side track, but no official answer for it has ever been given.

Trivia

 * The song was originally streamed at a rate of 24kbps on an MP3 format, but other better quality versions of the song have been available on the internet since.
 * It also samples the "Game Start" jingle from Balloon Fight for the 8-bit videogame console Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), first released in 1983.
 * Funnily enough, one of the games featured on the "Slowboat to Hades" DVD from Phase 2 was the "Gorillaz Entertainment System" (GES), a parody of the NES console, which had different mini games based on each one of the band members, and could also be found on Russel's room.