songs:365

Month: April 2021

  • day 100: Big Day Coming

    Big Day Coming (Second Version), by Yo La Tengo.

    Why yes, my favorite Yo La Tengo song is a really loud version of a really quiet song of theirs. Yo La Tengo is a band where I will buy anything, listen to anything, leave it on repeat for years, but I might never remember the name of an album or song except this one. I didn’t even realize there was a quiet version for a long time. This song became my anthem for starting/quitting jobs, moving, launching stuff, just generally useful for getting psyched up.

    That’s right, this is my walk-up music.

    //

    It’s day 100.

    I had planned to write a blog post and start sharing this project more widely, but events have overtaken me in the form of the unplanned home improvement project currently involving having moved everything out of the office and half the kitchen floor missing. Good times, but we’re making the best of it.

    I’ll write that blog post soon, honest. 😉

    One benefit of getting everything moved out of the office today? The microphone and MIDI keyboard were handy to make this sound a little less like a lo-fi bedroom cover and more like an over-engineered lo-fi bedroom cover.

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  • day 99: Never Say Goodbye

    Never Say Goodbye, by Bon Jovi.

    Fitting perhaps, that this song about not giving up on ideas that might not have been the best ideas, but were ideas nonetheless, graces us on day 99, recorded from a corner of the bedroom about 18 inches away from the dog, who fell asleep anyway, while the other two floors of the house are a little torn up with water damage repairs in progress.

    I knew I’d end up recording some of these in odd places, I just didn’t know it would be odd places inside my own home but here we are.

    Have I ever met a bad power ballad? I don’t know. There are so many good ones. There are also more Bon Jovi songs already on the list, but this one has been on the “maybe try this next time at karaoke” list in the Notes app on my phone. What, like you don’t have a karaoke list somewhere? You should. Dream big. Aim high. Fail spectacularly if you’re going to fail at karaoke.

    But honestly, anything from Slippery When Wet is going to be a winner.

    //

    Tuned down a half step last night for Poison as per the instructions, and didn’t realize until after I rehearsed this once and went to tune up. So I tuned all the way up, and it was easier to sing that way, too.

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  • day 98: Every Rose Has Its Thorn

    Every Rose Has Its Thorn, by Poison.

    This song might’ve been the first real guitar lesson I ever had. My aging British ex-pat metal-haired teacher wrote it out in my composition book as a very simple 1-4-5 progression in A, and taught me those three chords.

    Meanwhile, that was years after I had bought a copy of Look What The Cat Dragged In, and had honest questions about the hair and makeup choices involved.

    Today proved that I could balance…. a lot of things…. including dishwasher repair disasters, a flooded office, and still manage to get a song in the can.

    Oh, and recording straight into the laptop and I guess the “reduce ambient noise” feature in the OS is new? Or do I have Krispr turned on somewhere? Because we need as many overlapping ambient noise reduction layers as we can get these days, lest any of our business colleagues hear the real world bleeding in from the edges of the night.

    Anyway, I should’ve turned off the noise reduction thingie, but didn’t, so instead I “fixed” it in post, and while it’s not as bad as this morning when I “fixed” the dishwasher, it’s a bit of a hack.

    And I’m alright with that.

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  • day 97: Country Honk

    Country Honk, by The Rolling Stones.

    Sure, more Rolling Stones, because once again, I feel like weird tunings are a little investment you can let pay off for a couple days.

    This is in open G DGDGBD IIRC, because Keith Richards.

    Y’all heard the whole Let It Bleed story already, so I’ll leave it at th— actually, did I ever tell you about the time I saw the Rolling Stones at the Orange Bowl? Steel Wheels tour, and my 13-year-old brain was pretty scrambled by the stadium-grade showmanship, which, I believe, may have included at least one if not two giant inflatable women of some vintage for this song.

    Which, ew, but also, I was 13.

    I remember being truly, intensely amazed when they did Sympathy for the Devil and Mick appeared on top of some tall scaffolding tower thing, like a fricking David Copperfield trick, but make it rock and roll.

    //

    I also took out an ancient and little used slide for this, because it is literally what it is for. Added some goofy pianee, and continued the “not drunk but sure sounds like it” theme with the bass and sloppy drums.

    //

    OK, I went to look for some picture of that ridiculous set, and I found literally the video of that song from the show I was at, so here it is.

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  • day 96: Pink Moon

    Pink Moon, by Nick Drake.

    Yes, I know. We all heard this song for the first time in a car commercial. I know I did. If you’re around my age, either you did, or your parents were really cool, I guess? Because I had never heard of Nick Drake before that commercial.

    //

    I followed some instructions I found to use a sort of almost open D tuning: DADGDF# and it’s lovely enough. Funny thing is, normally you can search for a tuning like that online and find other songs, or articles about it, or something other than, well, mostly this one song. Oh, and it’s probably wrong. There was another tuning listed in that chart, and it’s the CGCFCE you can find in other articles about his tunings and playing style, and sometimes involves a capo, too, I guess?

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  • day 95: Peng! 33

    Peng! 33, by Stereolab.

    Hi, please meet my favorite band in the world of all time, Stereolab.

    Facts:

    • I’m sure the first album of theirs I owned was Mars Audiac Quintet.
    • This song is from Peng, which I think came just before that one.
    • I once saw them play in the NYU student center for $4.
    • I saw them play a bunch of other times in New York at places like Irving Plaza, usually.
    • My final sophomore video project was set to a song from Mars Audiac Quintet. It was kinda terrible, but very meta, which was my m.o., even then.
    • I have lots of Stereolab records now, and some solo stuff from Laetitia Sadier, and even a couple Monade 7 inches, but also the UILab record, which is lovely, and idk what else. I don’t think I’m missing much, especially with the periodic roundups of singles and b-sides and tour 7 inches and whatnot compiled.
    • I last saw them in September of 2019 in the Before Times, in Washington D.C., the only time I have seen a show at (not really the original) 9:30 Club.
    • I also earned a $100+ speeding ticket that night thanks to some cameras and took an hour or more to find a place to park. I don’t love driving in D.C.
    • I asked them to play Crest that night, and they did, in the encore, and I felt privileged AF.
    • I looked at the chords to Crest today and went “oh. well that’s really not that complicated, is it.” and felt a little bad, but it’s still a pleasant little vehicle to rock out on.
    • I played this sweet song because I liked the chord changes and it’s so positive, with a nice rising sound to it in the verses.
    • I need more appropriate synth sounds for this, and started trying to understand how to download stuff and add it to garageband. I didn’t finish that job, but I’ll get there.
    • I messed up the break and then messed it up different ways with each instrument, so that was cool.
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  • day 94: Home Sweet Home

    Home Sweet Home, by Motley Crue.

    I have my Motley Crue records all mixed up. I think it’s because I remember Dr. Feelgood better, but I must’ve had a copy of Decade of Decadence, too, hence my relationship with this song, although it definitely feels like a product of repeated Headbangers Ball viewing, too.

    What can I say, I love a good power ballad, and they’re all good.

    //

    Starting to get convinced the acoustic + garageband effects sounds better in this format than pointing the mic at the electric amp, but I have lots to learn.

    Oh, and I am not a real piano player yet, but I gave it a shot.

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  • day 93: Black

    Black, by Pearl Jam.

    Kinda feel like I’ve already exposed myself as a person who was a big Pearl Jam fan in high school, but the truth is I didn’t make it beyond the second record (which had two or three great songs on it). I managed to see them play live twice; once at Lollapalooza just 30 or so hours before Hurricane Andrew, and the second time at an amphitheater just adjacent to that park. The second show was very very early days in their boycott of Ticketmaster, and it was a small space with not enough supply of seats to meet demand. Some folks showed up without tickets, tore down the weak chain link fence they had put up around the area, and made their way to the show.

    I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about which side of the fence I was on that night. 😉

    This song isn’t my favorite off Ten, but at least it’s one where the lyrics don’t immediately make me uncomfortable knowing how comfortable I was with them at age 16 or 17.

    Added some appropriate guitar bits and called it a night.

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  • day 92: Let It Bleed

    Let It Bleed, by the Rolling Stones.

    The odds are good, the first time I purchased a cassette tape of this album, it was for Sympathy For The Devil. Like, very good odds on that one. But I fell in love with the whole thing, especially Gimme Shelter. This was one of those late ’80s tapes, where you only figured out a couple years later when it came out on CD that the songs were not in the original order. Who in their right mind would put Midnight Rambler as the opening track of this thing?

    Anyway, idk why I thought about this song today, but it’s the least SFW thing on the list yet, I think. I did not fully get all the lyrics as a kid, but I knew it was a little dirty. (In the context of, say, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, this was very irrelevant to my upbringing.)

    //

    After my crack about Dylan doing every song in E with a capo, here are the Stones finding a way to take a super standard A-D-E progression and drop it into C instead. It was kinda easy to play some pian-ee on it as a result.

    Closing in on day 100…

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  • day 91: Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

    Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, by Bob Dylan.

    Half-accidentally did this with as much Johnny Cash in it as Bob Dylan, but I’m sure I heard Dylan first, in the years where Freewheelin’ and everything I got my hands on for $8.98 a pop in the bargain CD bin at my first record store job helped to build the idealized version of New York City in my head.

    This song is a subtle breakup/kiss-off number, with “fare thee well” meaning here what “bless your heart” means coming from certain Southern women.

    I don’t remember trying to play too many Dylan songs as a teenager though… maybe because they’re mostly three chords and ninety verses long? There’s lots of mid-sixties electric stuff I’d like to try out from Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 and that other one from that period…

    The funny thing when you look up chords to these songs is that they’re all different shapes, but with a capo to firmly plant it all in the key of E. Which I can respect, as someone who is not at all above getting to the key of D by any and all available means to make everything easier to sing.

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