songs:365

Month: January 2021

  • day 21: Dead Flowers

    Dead Flowers by the Rolling Stones (and Townes van Zandt)

    We really love Big Lebowski around these parts. The Townes van Zandt version on the soundtrack was the only version of this song I knew for a good solid 20 years, until I found out it was a Rolling Stones song. Mick makes me laugh. Townes makes me cry.

    This one could use a second guitar and a little solo line and maybe even some backup singing on the chorus, but I need to sleep.

    It’s day 21, and that’s three weeks, and Dad taught me you have to do something for three weeks to make it a habit, so here we are with a habit.

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  • day 20: When I Paint My Masterpiece

    When I Paint My Masterpiece, by The Band

    Is it a Dylan song? Is it a Band song? Is it a Dylan and The Band song? I know it best as a song by The Band, so that’s what it is to me.

    I must’ve sung this to my infant children a thousand times or more when I was rocking them to sleep in my arms. If it had worked better, I joked that I could probably play it when they were teenagers and they’d pass out without knowing why.

    I love this little song. It felt like a great day for something raw, and triumphant, and appropriately enough getting the recording for the day done before the aforementioned children are asleep in their beds means I can let a little looser and get a little louder.

    I’d add an accordion if I could. If I had a harmonica in the right key… huh wait maybe I do. Next time?

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  • day 19: Handshake Drugs

    Handshake Drugs by Wilco.

    Alright, fine, it’s day 19 and I’m repeating artists. In the end it will probably be fun (albeit predictable) to see who I play most often. Wilco will be high on the list. Handshake Drugs is a simple little thing but a few words are doing a lot of work.

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  • day 18: Highway Patrolman

    Highway Patrolman by Bruce Springsteen

    When did I start listening to Nebraska? On vinyl from some garage sale or thrift shop around the turn of the century? Probably. I knew nothing about it except that it was supposed to be good and different and I’ve gone all these years loving it (uh when in the right mood and able to handle how down it is) without ever reading about how it was made. Until just recently.

    Highway Patrolman was always my favorite, and I started playing this years ago, but now that I’m writing this down, I realize Hungry Heart is the song I really want to cover, so maybe I’ll have to do a second Springsteen.

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  • day 17: My Girls

    My Girls, by Animal Collective.

    I fell for this song a few different times, in phases, but really got into it before we were going to a Fleet Foxes show a few years ago with Animal Collective opening for them at literally Merriweather Post Pavilion and…. then I read about Panda Bear’s breakup and that they didn’t play the song anymore… or DID I? I can’t find anything remotely like that, but I can tell you they did not play this song when we saw them live.

    Fun Sunday project, including a little autotune on the additional vocals, a couple software synths, and don’t forget to wait until the beat drops.

    Oh, also. Am I singing the right words? Maybe not! This is what the guitar chords had written down, but looking at Genius, there are some big differences. I like these words just fine.

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  • day 16: Random Rules

    Random Rules, by Silver Jews.

    In my indie rock record purchasing days back in the East Village (hello, I was a type, but a lesser version of it, honest), I heard something that clearly sounded like Stephen Malkmus singing with a band that didn’t sound like Pavement, and asked if it was new Pavement, and the polite hipster at the register said no, of course not, there is no Pavement, this is Silver Jews.

    I’ve listened to this record on and off, nowhere near as much as I’ve listened to some of the Malkmus/Jicks/solo records, but when David Berman died, I picked it up again. Then Robin Pecknold name checked American Water on the Fleet Foxes record, and I tried this one out.

    Two acoustic tracks with a tiny bit of stereo you’ll hear on headphones! And the fuzzed up electric again to poorly mime a Malkmus fill for a solo at the end.

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  • day 15: Wellerman

    Wellerman, a, um, sea shanty, because that’s what we’re all singing this week.

    Not sure what to say about this except:

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  • day 14: I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

    I Am Trying To Break Your Heart by Wilco.

    I had a hard time picking a song today. I kept trying to go back to things I know well, but kept getting frustrated trying to finish before dinner or bedtime, and in the end I recorded after the kids were done for the night, and layered on all these other fun things in my dark office up too late.

    I heard the story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before I got into Wilco. But I knew the Uncle Tupelo records from long before that. And then I heard some live recordings, and Heavy Metal Drummer was my gateway.

    I Am Trying To Break Your Heart holds a special space, though maybe not as emotional a space as the whole Sky Blue Sky album, but still.

    Oh, and when I do a silly minor middle-of-Via-Chicago thing with the drums, that’s because the dog scratched at the office door and I had to let her in. (She didn’t come in. It wasn’t time for work.)

    Still trying to learn how to get the keyboard timing right with the software instruments.

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  • day 13: Harness Your Hopes

    Harness Your Hopes, by Pavement.

    This odd b-side became one of Pavement’s most popular songs on Spotify for very strictly algorithmic reasons and that makes it extra fascinating to me.

    Nowhere close to my favorite Pavement song, and has little meaning to me personally, since I heard it for the first time in the past couple years as Spotify started carrying all these deep cut rerelease remaster whatever thingies of all the Pavement albums, which I have on vinyl, thank you very much, but was already late to when a certain art student a year older than me played Crooked Rain in her dorm room and I developed a crush but she was gay and I was thoroughly clueless.

    The vinyl all got taped to cassette and even later stuff like their last album together was walkman fodder for my walking-and-commuting-a-lot-in-New-York-City years.

    Added an electric track and kinda sorta tried to play the solo at the end, which is cute. If it sounds like anything it’s thanks to the Fuzz Factory pedal I have specifically so I can sound a little like Stephen Malkmus. (The guitar and amp were also selected to serve that purpose but we’ll get to them later.)

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  • day 12: Untitled

    Untitled by Palace Songs

    Did I really start listening to Palace because of that Amy Sohn column in New York Press? Maybe. Maybe I got into them after one of my most indie rocking indie rock friends in college played something of theirs at… a party? A dinner party? Why was I there? I met that guy on a student film where he was the DP and the dolly grip was cracking up for some reason and sort of ran away from the set while the camera was rolling and I jumped up and finished the shot and it only occurs to me all these years later that it was the first of TWO times that I ended up getting a gig because a dolly grip laughed during a camera move and the second time it had to do with Joan Rivers.

    Anyway.

    Playing with Garage Band software instruments and layering on more vocals to disguise my lack of talent is fun and reminds me of learning to use Photoshop around 2001 and covering up for my crappy scanner that left a pink streak on everything.

    But also, this song is somehow banal yet critical to my psyche. I mumbled the words at dinner tonight and my wife recognized it from the first mixtape I ever mailed her.

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