This song is another off the Sweet Relief tribute to Victoria Williams, Lucinda’s sister, circa the year I worked at the first record store. (The original is sparse and sweet and amazing.)
For a long time it was my “going back to wherever I live after a trip somewhere else” song, as the plane descended into New York, or anywhere else, and the lights of the city look so good.
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Father’s Day project, started in the morning before our hike out at the Manassas battlefield park, and finished after, but before dinner.
I can’t really sing the high parts in this, but the rest of it is passable, including, surprise, this key works just fine for one of my ol’ harps. (I cleaned it up a little. but I think I’m supposed to soak it or something to limber it up after sitting in a box on a shelf for a bunch of years.
Oh, and there’s no good chord chart for this on the internet, so I had to figure it out myself, more or less. I really need to sign into my account at one of those places and submit this one.
This song is one I’ve seen in a songbook I’ve owned for probably going on 30 years, and it looked much, much harder before I bought a capo. Bit easier now! But not so easy that I don’t keep messing up the same parts on multiple tracks of guitar that I keep adding to cover up the mistakes on the first track, ha, ha ha.
Limping closer to the halfway point of this project — and 2021 — but it still feels like it’s all passing much more quickly than last year, doesn’t it?
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Oh, btw, I bought new headphones, and they’re better than ancient iPhone thingies, I think?
Also, I will work on the terrible guitar strap rubby noises that come through so clearly with the microphone and the guitar where they tend to be on quiet numbers like this one.
Yes, we’re watching Loki. Honestly, this song gets mixed up with We Don’t Need Another Hero from Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome in my head, so I didn’t immediately place it on the Footloose soundtrack, which, in retrospect, I must say, was extremely influential for me.
I mean, I guess? Look, all I remember is planning some pretty intricate performances to it in mom’s photo studio (previously referenced here regarding Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger album) with the cassette playing on the boombox. (Honestly, looking it up now, maybe only side 1?) Holy cow, Almost Paradise sits squarely in the sweet spot between being a banging proto-power ballad duet and Stranded At the Drive-In from Grease.
Also, I have no idea what was supposed to happen in the bridge of this song, and have no memory of it.
This will probably not be the only Bonnie Tyler song in this project.
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Played with some reverb settings. Still have a cold. We said goodbye to the dog today, but I don’t have the guts to sing about it yet.
You can’t really blame me for making this one sound sad when it has all those minor chords! Who put those in this happy song? I guess that’s the point.
This song instantly puts me in our old Honda, commuting the short distance to my first job here in Virginia, driving through our first neighborhood of renters and migrants and people like us starting over somewhere, having kids, trying to move forward.
We spent the snowiest winter on record for the DC area there, pregnant and shoveling and making hot chocolate for the neighbors and shoveling and looking for a house and seeing ours right after the third major snowstorm of that winter, almost into spring, and I remember walking through knee-deep snow around the side.
We didn’t know the back yard had a pond in it until we saw the pictures at closing.
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I might have a little cold, so the next few days could get a little quiet and/or instrumental.
Welp, this started with me browsing through Kanye West songs, looking for something I could do without too much appropriative discomfort, landing on Lost in the World, looking at the Bon Iver version to try and get the chords right, getting a little enamored with the little intro I saw tabbed out, and spending a good solid two hours tonight recording and mixing all these silly vocals after spending some idle time today downloading various plugins and effects that are not the thing you really need to sound like this song, and in the end I’m pretty happy with the end product here.
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Processing this one made my computer fan hum a little bit.
If I still do the Kanye version, it will be both a cover-of-a-cover and a remix of this recording, OK? OK.
Rites of passage for college dorm rooms in the ’90s included… well, there was a long list, but a substantial amount of musical attention was paid to reggae in our undergrad years, and the movie The Harder They Come was an early centerpiece, as was its soundtrack. Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker — all introduced.
This song didn’t loom as large in our mythology as certain Toots numbers, and we’ll get to those, but it’s awfully playable.
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Restrung the acoustic, but couldn’t resist adding an electric track, too, though I didn’t really attempt a percussive reggae thing with it.
Resisted the urge to add a software horn section, but I might not hold back next time.
(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem) by Car Seat Headrest.
Even if this song is somehow not relatable for you, it’s relatable. Of everything I like about Car Seat Headrest, my favorite thing is that this kid is literally from here, like, the next town over from where I live, and lived around here while my family lived around here, and like, maybe I know people that know his parents or whatever. And it’s fun to get a nice angsty view of the suburbs where you live and know that the kid who wrote this song was referring to a finite number of high schools and cops and characters, and it’s not hard to imagine them playing their roles in the continuing suburban melodrama, and even then, it’s a nice familiar story.
(And honestly after like 60 seconds of Googling, I really do probably know people who know his parents, and they seem like good folks and his biggest fans.)
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Sometimes, like last night, I really have to listen to the song before/during recording to get certain parts “right” enough to be happy with them, or to kinda fact check the melody, but most nights, as you may have noticed, I don’t even pretend to bother with it, and then it’s a fun surprise to see if I did certain parts more or less like the record.
A fresh set of acoustic strings arrived this evening, but not before I had begun work on this with multiple electric tracks, and hey, just a reminder, playing electric guitar is lots of fun.
This song is one I have wanted to play all the way through for a good solid 25 years, so this is pretty satisfying, even with all the fumbling before the chorus.
The Sea And Cake is one of my favorite bands ever. Truly. You’ve probably never heard of them, and that’s fine. Yes, I know what I sound like. This is another band my indie rock friends back home in Miami got me into the summer after Freshman year of college. When I went back to school in the fall, it was CMJ season, and one of them made the trip up, took me to this Too Pure showcase at Wetlands, and we saw The Sea And Cake, and I kinda think Pram and Laika and idk but it was pretty amazing. I got the setlist. I lit Sam’s cigarette for him. He seemed pretty drunk, but then again, that was kinda his thing. Seeming that way, anyway.
Parasol is the song they closed shows with (I saw them as many times as I could after that night), off their second album, and from my perspective, always kinda cryptic to be everyone’s favorite? But I loved it.
Once, I swear, they played a show at Tramps — I don’t think this was the night they played there with Tortoise and 5ivestyle(and closed with a mind-melting all-hands Grazing in the Grass with like dueling vibraphone thingies omg), I think this was a different show, like, right after a new album was released, and it was… not great? The new songs didn’t sound super rehearsed, and they seemed all out of whack, and I swear to this day, they cut it a little short, played Parasol, and during the chorus, Sam sang “caught us on an off night, we’re in tune and that’s all” but how can that really have happened? I don’t think it really happened.
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Hey I found a guitar with six strings that stays in tune, and it’s my electric. Pretty neat trick! Extremely pleased with how the guitars came out, again, despite me not really knowing how to play the pre-chorus bit right, and not having the patience to keep watching the live YouTube video I found to figure it out, after having figured out which F# and E they’re playing for the chorus, which was pretty crucial.
Layered on a buncha stuff, but didn’t attempt to ruin it with drums, because I am no John McEntire.