songs:365

Month: January 2021

  • day 11: A Girl In Port

    A Girl In Port by Okkervil River.

    I can only assume I first heard Okkervil River on NPR All Songs Considered, most likely in the years of my longest car commute, when podcasts dotted a landscape otherwise made up of recurring Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, torrented-and-burnt Kanye, and the like.

    I was already half a decade late to this record then, but in 2007 I was probably stuck on Bright Eyes and not sleeping much, because parenting.

    A guilty dissolve to merge two pieces after I messed up the last verse badly enough to ditch it. More production on my vocals would help here.

    This song doesn’t feel five minutes long when they do it.

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  • day 10: Friend of the Devil

    Friend of the Devil, by the Grateful Dead

    Listen, I know there are more interesting Dead songs, but Friend of the Devil was the quietest thing I could think of to play after running out the kids bedtime clock on Blank Space, which I’ll have to come back to when I have some more time to learn it in something approaching the right key that either Ryan Adams or Taylor Swift sing it in.

    The thing about American Beauty, as an album, was its over the top ubiquity in bargain CD bins in the early 90s. Like, as soon as CDs existed, you could find this record and the entirety of Bob Dylan’s catalog for $8.98 a pop.

    At the same time, other than Truckin’, this was probably the first Grateful Dead song I ever heard on the radio.

    I heard, um, much, much more Grateful Dead in college. I saw two of the last shows at MSG, including one on my 18th birthday, had a roommate who played a ton sophomore year, and picked my favorites from there. May of ’77. Europe ’72. None of the songs on American Beauty really seem that important any more, although Ripple might still make me weep in the right context.

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  • day 9: Dead Skunk

    Dead Skunk by Loudon Wainwright III

    THIS SONG IS DEDICATED TO THE SKUNK THAT HAS TAKEN UP RESIDENCE IN THE GROUNDHOG TUNNELS UNDER OUR FRONT STAIRS AND STUNK UP OUR WHOLE HOUSE THIS MORNING.

    I had a completely different Loudon Wainwright III song on the list, but sometimes inspiration just strikes you right in the guts. Or the nose. Or both.

    https://twitter.com/ryansholin/status/1347945228045590528

    Three chords and a software tamboruine.

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  • day 8: See America Right

    See America Right by the Mountain Goats

    Honestly no idea when I started listening to the Mountain Goats, but I mostly stick with the classics. This and No Children and This Year are just absolute anthems.

    One take and one overdub on electric for, uh, “solos.”

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  • day 7: Desaparecido

    Desaparecido by Manu Chao

    The first time I heard this album was probably the first day in New Mexico, the first day working on the gig where I met my wife. I loved it. Manu Chao’s music reminds of those weeks, those months, our early days together. There’s other music that might be more specifically romantic to us, but there’s no other music that we listened to as much at the beginning of our romance.

    Just try to get some feelings out, literally while the kids are brushing their teeth, running late to get them to bed. Three whole chords in this one. The translation(s) around the internet are… not great, but this one seems close.

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  • day 6: Hit The Ground Running

    Hit The Ground Running by Smog

    bit of a day

    I had to shut down Twitter and news and work and do something else to back away from the stream of madness for a few minutes and conveniently had a hard time with this two-chord number from Smog aka Bill Callahan.

    Conveniently, it starts with the words “I had to leave the country.”

    Leaving it nice and raw here because that’s how I feel and also because editing is time consuming!

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  • day 5: Love Me

    Love Me by Elvis Presley

    Well, I couldn’t mention it yesterday without singing it soon, so here it is. This song was on the Heartbreak Hotel soundtrack — yes, an ’80s movie about kidnapping Elvis and fixing him up with your mom — and looking back at the credits, it wasn’t even Elvis singing it on the cassette I wore out?

    OK, actor who played Elvis, or probably singer who did the vocals for the actor, look, I’m not sure if the version I remember is yours or Elvis Presley’s, but I loved that song and never heard it anywhere else.

    I know my guitar teacher wrote the chords out for me on this one in F, because I have it in my old Mel Bay spiral manuscript book somewhere between Stairway to Heaven and Hotel California.

    But that F barre chord is a jerk, so I learned it in E.

    This took a few takes, mostly because the more I ham up the performance, the harder time I have getting the parts in the right order. Added a couple backup singers who don’t know harmonies on the final chorus because otherwise I just mumble-hum it anyway. But didn’t bother mixing it properly.

    Oh, also, different camera angle today.

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  • day 4: Sex and Magic

    Sex and Magic by Esther Rose

    Not actually a cover of a cover, I think? Though I was tempted by Johnny Cash’s version of Tom Waits’s Down There By The Train, this is Sex and Magic.

    I added a second vocal doubling part of the chorus, managed to fail at exporting it to the video around dinnertime, and listening to it now, it wasn’t worth keeping. Someday I’ll learn to sing harmony on a song I didn’t memorize in elementary school.

    Oh, and the whistling doesn’t do the fiddle justice.

    Here’s a piece about the writing of this song.

    “People have told me that this song makes them feel nostalgic in a way they can’t explain”

    Yes! I imagine it has something to do with the chord changes. I’m using a capo as instructed in the online version of the chords, but it seems silly since you could play it open in G without any trouble. It reminds me a little bit of Love Me by Elvis with the seventh in there (yes, the one music thing I can identify, sure, fine.)

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  • day 3: Frying Pan

    Frying Pan, by Victoria Williams (but I only know the Evan Dando cover)

    YO DAWG i heard you like covers of covers so i put a cover in your cover so you can cover while you cover.

    Right, so, day three, and it’s the third day of playing a song I know best as a cover. This is not the only song from the Sweet Relief tribute to / benefit for Victoria Williams (sister to Lucinda) that I have on the list. This is also another song I only ever heard in public at that first record store where I worked as a teenager. Formative years!

    I also have a funny Evan Dando story from just a couple years later when I was a freshman in college. The details are not for search engines, but the tl;dr is that we shut down a long gone East Village bar, singing along to Aretha Franklin on the jukebox, mostly.

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  • day 2: Blue Bayou

    Blue Bayou by Roy Orbison but really with Linda Rondstadt’s version in mind.

    Sometime in the past couple years, I heard an Esther Rose cover of Blue Bayou and tried it out. I probably heard Linda Rondstadt’s version first as a kid, because that’s just how Love 94, the local radio station ubiquitous in our house at the time, would have rolled.

    I added a second track of electric guitar to fill it out a little, because it’s the weekend and I had a minute. Oh, also, this must be pandemic self-haircut 5 or so.

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