songs:365

Month: April 2021

  • day 110: Plateau

    Plateau, by the Meat Puppets.

    Yes, I heard this song (and this band) for the first time on Nirvana Unplugged, which I believe we’ve already talked about. (I am watched-it-the-first-time-on-MTV years old.) And I played it much more like Nirvana than Meat Puppets here, so I guess this is yet another cover-of-a-cover.

    Uh, except for the part where there’s a whole bridge/ending section that I missed? (Also, that Meat Puppets album is from 1984 and way ahead of its time and you should listen to it, wow!)

    I’m really struggling with the “the” in front of some of these band names. I assume Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and whatnot have a style guide for this purpose. I have no style guide.

    More non sequiturs: Don’t want to build this up too much or have to keep track of a second number, but this is the first day I tried Farewell Transmission and didn’t have the stamina to go through with it. Maybe another day.

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  • day 109: Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain

    Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, by Willie Nelson.

    Looking this song up recently, I learned that Hank Williams sang it, and Willie didn’t write it, which was a surprise, given its slot on Red Headed Stranger, and RHS being a real live concept album, but OK, country music, keep on surprising me.

    I talked about this album and what I associate with it wayyyy back on day 26.

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    Kept it simple tonight, but still took three takes to get the little chunka-chunka-chunk runs… well, still not quite right, but it’s good enough for tonight.

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  • day 108: Freebird II

    Freebird II, by Parquet Courts.

    This song has been on the list for a long time, one of my favorite Parquet Courts songs to sing along with in the car. A rare daytime recording today, with natural light, the ten-year-old mashing his mouse playing Roblox on the couch next to me, and perhaps the dog snoring.

    Parquet Courts is of course one of countless bands I only know about because of an All Songs Considered podcast or something similar, but I always remember I spotted one of my “little” (millennial) cousins listening to them on Spotify in the scrobbling days, so I felt like it was validated as cool.

    I don’t know too much else about the band, other than I like all their music.

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    Drum loop, MIDI organ, guitar-as-bass dropped an octave, rhythm guitar, vocals with sparse additional guitar, and two backup vocals, recorded in that order.

    I love how I can spend 20 minutes looking for the right drum loop in garageband, but the right answer is always, like, “BAR BAND FOUR ON THE FLOOR” or something like that, which makes sense when you realize I am not brave enough to keep up with a drum loop on anything more complicated than that.

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  • day 107: Closer To Fine

    Closer To Fine, by Indigo Girls.

    If you didn’t go through an Indigo Girls phase in high school in the 1990s, you knew someone who did. (And I’m wrong to call it a phase — they’re still making music and people are still listening.)

    But… their first couple of albums were Very Important to people who were Very Important to me, and this song of course sticks in my psyche and memory more than the others, but don’t sleep on Galileo, Kid Fears, or of course their Romeo and Juliet cover, not ever.

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    I couldn’t quite get the chorus right, and my lack of harmony skills continues to bite me. Sometimes when I sing the lead vocal, I think I’m probably singing the harmony part, and then I go to record a second vocal and end up just doubling it.

    Also, this is probably not the first time someone sang an Indigo Girls song while wearing an American Outlaws t-shirt.

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  • day 106: Jack and Diane

    Jack and Diane, by John (Cougar) Mellencamp.

    This song came up in a thread this week about…. uhhhhmmmmm… Alvin and the Chipmunks? I’m… not going to explain.

    Anyway.

    Jack and Diane.

    I owned this album on vinyl when it was, like, contemporary? I was a small child. Loved this song, though. Literally have gone almost 40 years of my life without knowing the full lyrics to this in any way that approached accuracy, and I’ll forget the unimportant bits 30 seconds after it finishes uploading. “Suckin’ on chili dog” is the important part.

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    Got the microphone situation correct tonight, figured out a version of the little lick, doubled that one guitar part with something bigger, and added the silly drum fill, which is the happiest moment in it for me.

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  • day 105: Say You Love Me

    Say You Love Me, by Fleetwood Mac.

    Speaking of Love 94, Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and all variations thereof are Love 94 Yacht Rock in its purest form. As usual, my karaoke habits well precede the trending TikToks by a good solid 7 years, as I once stood up in front of a semi-friendly Louisville crowd and busted out what was then an “old man” song, Dreams, and full respect to the other guy about my age in the audience who was rocking out to it.

    This song, on the other hand, has just been in my head recently, and it took forever to figure out what it was called and find the chords for it. (HINT: It is not called “falling” or “when the loving starts” but it could be.)

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    So after multiple perfectly fine sound checks, I think I managed to unplug the good microphone, and judging by the stereo track in garageband, I think I might’ve accidentally recorded the vocal and guitar with the old iPhone headphone mic instead. But it was getting late, so I worked with it.

    You can also hear the dog come downstairs and catch a glimpse of her plopping down next to me on the couch. That’s a treat.

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  • day 104: Echos Myron

    Echos Myron, by Guided By Voices.

    Going to see bands with singers that spend the whole show drunk and stumbling are all sorts of fun in theory, but in practice, I don’t remember much of the time I saw GBV play Roseland in New York City… but when I look up their Roseland shows now, either I saw them open for Pavement in 1994 (?!?!?!?!) or I saw them play a CMJ show in 1999 with Jets to Brazil and Cheap Trick (!?!?!?!?!) and I really don’t see how either of those things are possible, but I remember seeing them at Roseland, so … ?!?!??!?!?

    This song might be the sweetest off of the album that came out at the moment when my indie rock friends back home in Miami were getting me into all the good indie rock the first (only) summer home from college.

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    Doubled the little solo at the end up an octave (uh, digitally), and I think it worked!

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  • day 103: You’re So Vain

    You’re So Vain, by Carly Simon.

    Have I talked about Love 94 yet? I probably have. The radio station that was on by default in our house for maybe the first 7 years of my life was focused on what we might now consider “soft rock” or mayyyybe “easy listening” depending on the decade, but then it was just pretty mainstream pop music, I think? Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Carly Simon, Irene Cara, maybe a little Journey, definitely Air Supply, certainly the Carpenters, etc.

    This song is one of a thousand I identify with that radio station, and the stereo system in the first house I lived in (yes, there was an 8-track player hooked up to it, but I have only the vaguest memory of us ever using it – the radio and my personal Fisher Price turntable were primary sources.)

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    Apparently it’s apostrophe-in-song-title week here? That just makes me nervous about special character escaping and backwards compatibility, but we’ll go with it.

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  • day 102: Walkin’ After Midnight

    Walkin’ After Midnight, by Patsy Cline.

    About a hundred years ago, during my second semester of college, I took a sound class where I made a few of my best friends for years after; but before we worked together on a Bukowski radio drama adaptation (of course), I used this song on an early project as the background-slash-setup to an audio punchline involving a guy looking for his dog.

    Patsy Cline sounds like music a very specific friend of my mom’s would’ve put me onto, but I don’t really remember the origin story of how I got into her Greatest Hits CD.

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    I think 100 songs was definitely the turning point where I’m craving some data about what I’ve been doing here.

    Yes, I have a spreadsheet, but beyond artist and song title, I’ve almost intentionally not gathered much. What would be interesting? I could use tags for artist, decade, genre… (heh, what do I love to argue about more than a genre taxonomy?)

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  • day 101: Johnny Mathis’ Feet

    Johnny Mathis’ Feet, by American Music Club.

    Today’s the day we find out what it sounds like when I point the microphone in the wrong direction! Spoiler: The guitar sounds great. The vocal, well, depends what you think of my vocals. I’m no Mark Eitzel, but I have a soft spot for this song and this album by American Music Club. It’s definitely another from the “heard this at the record store where I worked as a teenager” collection.

    A few (?) years later, I saw Eitzel play… somewhere? I feel like that was still in New York, maybe in some Knitting Factory space, but I’m also a little suspicious it was years (!) later in California? But not at the actual Great American Music Hall, though I did make it there with my wife to see a friend play in one of the premier Frank Zappa bands the week we got engaged.

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    This was my first favorite song off that album, but if you haven’t heard it, save some space for “I’ve Been A Mess.”

    Also, the apostrophe in the song title really needs to be one of those terrible s's jobs, but that would just leave me trying to write around it, and “I lay all my songs at the feet of Johnny Mathis” wouldn’t work nearly as well.

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