Once again, this song is from the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack that absolutely planted itself in my brain. The “UK Surf” mix, of course. This is definitely one of those songs where I heard the remix first, and the original always irritates me by not having the same vibe. (Big Day Coming by Yo La Tengo does this in reverse; I like the heavy one, and the slow one never drops the beat, it just leaves me waiting.)
A little annoyed with myself that I didn’t let the drums start, but I tried to get the vibe close enough. That’s what I get for adding the drums toward the end of the process, natch. This was fun.
This song is one of those where you remember exactly where you were when you first heard it. I was on the way home from work, in my commuting days, and can remember singing along with this playing on an All Songs podcast on a particular highway ramp exit, at the end of what was probably a long day, given the year, and all the long days I had that year.
I haven’t been bothering to gender-switch any of these songs, excepting the cover-of-cover confusion around Bobby McGee and the like. It feels silly, and inaccurate, and not worthwhile. But everyone hears what they want to hear.
Fun set of vocal layers toward the end, and didn’t take that long at all. Honestly, adding the extra verses after I stopped the video was the trickiest part.
This song is quiet and arresting and provokes attention and thought, which seems to be true of most Kevin Morby songs. I think I mentioned the Farewell Transmission cover with Waxahatchee once already — and I’ll need to play that song soon — but that’s where I first heard his name, then his 2020 album dropped in the middle of everything, and it’s a nice solid heartbeat with a lot of questions.
This one is actually a single from 2016? It is. You can tell, because the references to mass shootings and police killings are… dated… and timely as ever.
//
Just acoustics and vocals tonight. Listening to the original, it could’ve used a little drum.
The Man Who Couldn’t Cry, by Johnny Cash (and Loudon Wainwright III).
When I started this project, I didn’t know how many covers-of-covers would be involved, nor would I have expected to play three Loudon Wainwright III songs in the first 77 days, but here we are, because it really might be the fourth Johnny Cash song, depending on how we’re classifying these things.
I am a pedant when it comes to taxonomy, but part of the fun of this project is playing and singing songs I have always wanted to play and sing, and another part of the fun has turned out to be finding inspiration in the (heavily curated and crafted by my own habits) serendipity of the music that pops onto Spotify in the car on the way back from soccer practice or while I’m making breakfast, and just reflecting back the soundtrack of my day.
This song (the original) came on today as we left the parking lot at soccer practice, and I made the 10-year-old listen a little, and maybe it was the rain, or maybe he was curious, or maybe he happened to drift into his own world right then, or replay the goal he scored, or maybe it really was the rain, but he seemed to be listening, didn’t complain, and didn’t reflexively chime in with his own pedantry about the impossibility of the lyrics.
Or maybe I just tuned him out. 😉
Kept it bare bones tonight, though I did have to tune up out of the weird Pavement stuff from yesterday.
OK, once you’re tuned down half a step, you might as well commit to weird tunings for another day, check the Pavement tuning list, switch into DADABE, and take on this song, second to last on Brighten the Corners.
I swear, I thought the whole “no coast of Nebraska” thing went on much longer, and that maybe it was “no Pope of Nebraska” but who am I to say. Also, the “hard, hard Cs” was “high, high Cs” in my memory for a long time.
Piled in a little too much and it’s silly, but there we are.
Did anyone else have certain albums that they could put on at bedtime (as a teen, or in your college years with a roommate) to fall asleep to? I mean, it’s not like that — I wasn’t boring myself to sleep — it was more like, the music would carry you off into dreams?
Eh, or less romantically to obscure the sounds of your roommates existing in small spaces?
Mazzy Star will help you get your Zs, true, but also, this song and its simple drone punches me in the guts with feelings, and it was really fun to sing.
Ended up doing this still tuned down half a step from last night’s Cat Power song because I tried it and loved how it sounded for this.
Added a buncha stuff, although I didn’t like the garageband effects on the acoustic as much this time. The synth pad thing is just right. I like synths. Synths are cool now.
Sometimes you just have go back to the source, and Cat Power for me, is an empty, warm, New York City apartment, distortion coming through the vinyl records and the warped hardwood floors, and the leaky foam around the garbage-nook-level apartment, the Laverne & Shirley apartment, my mother called it, because you could see people walking by outside if you ever dared peek through the sheets I nailed over the windows.
This song is from Moon Pix, and well, let’s let Wikipedia do some of the talking here:
Much of the album was written in a single night, following a hallucinatory nightmare Marshall experienced while staying at a farmhouse in South Carolina. Prior to that, Marshall had intended to retire from music.
what
while alone in the South Carolina farmhouse she shared with her then-boyfriend, Bill Callahan
what??
Oh and The Dirty Three accompany her on most of this record, and my goodness gracious, that is one of the reasons it grabs me by the guts.
Had a little fun with this one. My favorite part is the second acoustic track with garage band distortion applied, but the background hum of the guitar sounded like a jet engine in the quiet parts (hmm maybe that was the space heater?) so I had to crank up the noise gating to the point where there’s like no sustain and the guitar sounds nice and chopping.
A fourth Wilco song? Blame it on the marigolds. Seriously, I was looking at the (still dormant) garden out back and trying to remember what was in this one pot, and I remembered it’s the marigolds, and, as ever, this song popped into my head.
A bunch of weekend layers, including a couple electric guitar tracks, and a (successful?) desperate attempt to add some harmony at the end by transposing one of the backup tracks up a few steps. Feels like I got lucky! Also managed to mess up the part at the end where there’s a little mini key change that I missed.
I was playing some Weird Al for the 10-year-old on the way home from soccer today. He’s been getting into Monty Python (a little) and I had run out of, uh, 10yo-appropriate material from them, so I tried Al. Landed an unexpected win with the Captain Underpants Theme Song (though he complained it’s not the regular one – maybe this was from the movie?) and then moved on to The Saga Begins (Day the Music Died, but make it Episode I), which made me tear up with laughter, and, indeed, tears.
And then Party in the CIA came on, and he kinda recognized this song a little, and I had to explain the CIA, so there was that, but we live in Northern Virginia, so he should know these things.
I played it a full step lower than the internet told me to. Sorry, that had more to do with the state of my left wrist and size of my fingers than my vocal range, which is bad enough as is. Was I going for emo? Johnny Cash? Lin Manuel? Could’ve had some fun with autotune on this one.
Spent a little Saturday afternoon time on this, which was a good way to lower my heart rate after (watching my child play) soccer.
We’ve all been holed up in our Hollywood hotel suites for year now, with tequila to drink and avocado to eat.
This song is the second Loudon Wainwright III number on the list — oh and by the way, the skunk is back. I fell into listening to this guy’s music after John Prine died and there was a really nice and relatively recent video going around of John Prine playing in like an apartment in Paris or something — it was a small space, whatever, and Loudon Wainwright was sitting there enjoying himself, singing along, eyes closed.
Do I have that story right? googling noises
Yes. Yes I do.
John Prine was one of the first famous (to us, anyway) people we lost a year ago when this all started, and his was the first song I sang for this project on the first of the year. That was not intentional, but here we are, a year into this particular sickness, an anniversary offset, the beginning and end of a season.