Your Song, by Elton John.
It seems like 100% of my experience of Elton John’s music has been through the radio. Never owned an Elton John record, never been to a show, never had it around the house, but I could probably sing parts of a good solid 40 Elton John songs if you made me.
Please, don’t make me.
There a few that I have some feelings about, though, like this one and Daniel, and maybe a couple more.
Kept it simple tonight! One take, including some stumbles, one track only.
Late In The Evening, by Paul Simon.
I don’t know where to begin cataloging the history of my relationship with Paul Simon’s (and sometimes Garfunkel’s) music, so let’s do an old fashioned list.
Mashed everything so hard on this one it was all too loud and I had to mix it a second time and it’s still too loud. Didn’t get the whole trumpet line right, but not bad for a few minutes of tinkering!
Holland 1945, by Neutral Milk Hotel.
I guess it’s the weekend for non-ironically recording nineties classics that people joke about a lot on the internet?
Not only did I miss Neutral Milk Hotel the first time around, even after I got into this album in my 40s, I didn’t pick up that it was about Anne Frank until I saw some amusing tweet about it.
OK! This was the most actual fun this project has been in a few days I guess. The verdict is that I enjoy playing the electric guitar QUITE a bit. So there acoustic and electric rhythm tracks on this, plus what passes for lead guitar (absolute disaster in closing bars of that finale solo thing), and a kinda subtler than usual organ bass thing.
Oh, and the requisite desperately autotuned backing vocal to cover up my singing a little bit.
Wonderwall, by Oasis.
Look, once you commit to playing 365 songs, the odds of Wonderwall being in there somewhere are pretty solid. I don’t have a whole lot of feelings about this one at all, it’s just fun, and the meme never gets old.
In fact, if you hear me say the words “Anyway, here’s Wonderwall” at karaoke, the chances I am about to sing Wonderwall are approximately zero, and you’re more likely to be in for something by Bon Jovi.
Hungry Heart, by Bruce Springsteen.
From around the same period as Being With You, and again, perhaps because I was living a capo-free life with my old Blueridge acoustic that had incredibly high action, I learned to play this with bar chords higher up the neck, but it’s nice this way, too.
Whenever I sing the part about the bar in Kingstown, I am picturing a very specific place in Kingstown, New York. Or was it Saugerties? Or even Woodstock itself? Or is that a bar from a music video? My memory is a little fuzzy, but I can see the space, and the wood, and hear this song playing, and feel loss.
Kiss Off by Violent Femmes.
What’s your summer camp music? The music you heard for the first time on a scratchy cassette in a college dorm basement with cheap tile floor and worn out couches that served as dance hall, laundry room flirt space, and cloistered music space away from the noise and chaos of the main lobby with the TV?
OK, so my summer camp experience may have been different from yours, but my early teenage years were filled with the imported angst of kids from the Carolinas — or maybe I was the import from Miami — and this song (and every other song on this album) was part of it.
If you’re not counting along, are we even friends?
A couple guitars and vocals, too loud and raw and sounding appropriately lo-fi, but not on purpose, but appropriate.
Being With You by Smokey Robinson.
It is a little irrational how much I sincerely love this song. I can not remember what inspired me to learn this one sometime in my last couple years in New York, but I did, and I annoyed my friends with it, and I made it my own. I guess some of us went through an Easy Listening phase, and I latched onto this gem from 1981. I do wish I had the chord changes I played back then written down, but the capo-oriented version here seemed like fun, too.
There are, uh, multiple tracks on this one. Took some self-control to leave it at once backup vocal, because my lead vocal needs some help here. The opening imitation sax riff is more evidence that I am better at adding effects and layers than I am at mashing the keyboard at the right time. (This is not a metaphor.)
Saw A Light by Bonny Doon.
I don’t remember how this one found me, but I wanted to play it right away. I think I have that first take on my phone somewhere, but here’s a slightly evolved version with a few guitars and a couple voices and it’s not perfect but it’s better than yesterday’s song, so I’ll take it.
Bonny Doon happens to be a place near Santa Cruz, and there was a vineyard and we must’ve sold the wine in one of the restaurants where I worked in those days before grad school.