songs:365

Month: July 2021

  • day 202: Gin and Juice

    Gin and Juice, by The Gourds.

    This is, yes, a #cover-of-a-cover. Appreciation, not appropriation, I hope. And I do, indeed, appreciate Snoop. One of the first big music videos I ever worked on was a “featuring Snoop Dogg, Da Brat, and Missy Elliot” remix of a huge hit, and I was young and dumb enough to believe I could take pictures of my colleagues posing with Snoop, on a soundstage in New York, in the year of our lord 1999, with my 1950s Canon FT that looked like an accident, and so did its light meter, on the inside, anyway, and let’s just say my film did not come home with me that night, but I was well paid for my labor.

    This song is a Napster classic, a mislabeled-as-Phish viral hit so aged, that I remember downloading it with what may have seriously been an IBM-compatible PC with 512kb of RAM? C’mon, is that true? I must’ve upgraded to like, a Pentium 133 before then, because this was the computer I “learned” Photoshop on, mostly to fix the pink stripe my cheap scanner put on everything.

    Anyway.

    Yes, it’s a bluegrass-adjacent cover of one of Snoop’s greatest.

    //

    Some of these songs are long, y’all. I’m going to do something shorter tomorrow.

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  • day 201: Rio

    Rio, by Duran Duran.

    True: A babysitter got me into Duran Duran when I was, like, seven years old. Maybe six. Teenagers seemed cool then.

    True: She had pictures of Simon and John and Andy and Nick and Roger up on her wall, cut out from Tiger Beat and Sixteen… so I started making mom buy magazines in line at the grocery store, and, yes, I had pictures of the Fab Five up on my walls by age eight or so.

    True: My first major childhood haircut change from parted on the side to embracing the curls (on top anyway) was modeled (in my mind) on Roger Taylor’s hair. (Duran Duran drummer Roger Taylor, obvi, not Queen Roger Taylor.)

    True: This song loomed so large in my psyche that at eight years old, at summer camp, I countered a friend’s bold lies about his “girlfriend” with lies of my own, about my girlfriend, who was older, and named Rio, and had a job, as a dancer, on the beach. I learned a lot about lying that summer.

    True: I ate up any and all scandal regarding the Duran Duran music video for Girls on Film, and I feel like I might’ve spent a lot of time watching MTV hoping they would show it?

    True: I will sing this song anytime, anywhere, and have done it at karaoke at least once. Maybe just the one time? It was pretty good.

    True: I have a copy of this on vinyl, but not, like, the one from when I was a kid, which must’ve been a cassette tape at that point, and I’m sure I absolutely destroyed that thing in a walkman by the time I was 10.

    //

    OK, this was fun. Obviously used some drum loops, but didn’t loop anything else. Paid special attention to some of the “beat drops out here” bits, and even added the little arpeggiated synth in the pre-chorus chord, which was, have I mentioned, fun!

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  • day 200: One Note Samba

    One Note Samba, by Antônio Carlos Jobim.

    It’s day 200, and I accidentally made a jazz. Figuring out which version of this song I’m covering is… tricky? See, the thing is, I remember this as if Astrud Gilberto is singing it, so I assumed it was a Jobim / Gilberto / Getz / Gilberto / etc. jawn from one of those Girl From Ipanema sessions, but it is not that thing, really.

    In that case, the vocal I’m remembering (Hendricks of Lambert, & Ross fame penned the English lyrics, apparently) must be Laetitia Sadier in the Stereolab version, which of course is the one I’ve heard the most, though the Ella Fitzgerald track sounds like something I would know from way back.

    //

    This is just a little samba, sure, right, so let’s learn some bossa nova chords and play it through a few times during the day before attempting a recording… And then spend way too long figuring out what the second note is, because I have no ear for the obvious.

    //

    Postscript: The Astrud + Stan version is of course wonderful. You probably haven’t heard Stereolab play this unless you’re, uh, a lot like me. Ella and Joe Pass handle it, and I’m definitely paying some homage to her vocal, which I guess I’ve internalized. (Oh, and she doesn’t bother with the Hendricks book.) MJQ drops one with a rather sample-ready percussion track.

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  • day 199: Rocky Top

    Rocky Top, by the Osborne Brothers.

    I’ll talk about Christmas at Christmas, and this isn’t Christmas in July, and this isn’t a Christmas song, but, strangely enough, this song is one I heard as a kid at Christmas, when one of the (then) teenagers from the families we spent every Christmas with would play her guitar and sing a few songs — well, we all sang a million songs, around the organ, or with her guitar, and later I brought my own, and for a few years there it was a whole talent show, and sometimes there was a karaoke machine…

    Anyway, Rocky Top. She’d play Rocky Top and it was awfully sweet. I didn’t learn until years later that it’s a University of Tennessee thing, and apparently, that’s relatively recent. We’re planning a little vacation in the Smokies in a few weeks, and I spotted Rocky Top on the map (which of course was not called Rocky Top until recently; they changed a town’s name to get a little rub of fame) and this caught in my head.

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  • day 198: Fat Bottomed Girls

    Fat Bottomed Girls, by Queen.

    I always have to double check whether I’m thinking of this song, or the Spinal Tap version. No, yes, this is Freddie Mercury singing about ladies with big butts. Ahead of his time, to say the absolute very least. This makes very little sense, and it’s a glorious rock song, with its little breaks and whatnot.

    Listening to the original after recording mine, yes, indeed, I imposed a little piece of Whole Lotta Love on this, and got the riff thus all wrong. I will let it stand, to say the absolute very least. I mean, there’s a connection, at least.

    I also can’t sing like anyone in Queen, much less Freddie, so you get what you get.

    //

    It is day gazillion of this project, and the second 100 days have certainly gone by faster than the first 100, as we approach day 200 of this ridiculous year. It will be over before we know it. Honest.

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  • day 197: Remedy

    Remedy, by the Black Crowes.

    Funny story! I sold my first electric amp (bought used in 1989) today, for more than I (Mom) bought it for (uh, well, less, minus shipping and fees and all that but still), and I thought to look up whether my BOSS Heavy Metal™ pedal was worth anything, and IT IS! So I dug it out of storage (I have already forgotten where I found it, but it was not put away as deeply as I expected, like maybe in a drawer) and made sure it was… in… good… working… order…. ohhhh dear I don’t think I can part with this just yet? Does it sound better now that I know it’s worth money? I’m not sure, but I am positive that last time I took it out, I was less impressed.

    I’m also pretty sure that playing Remedy through it is not the heaviest of metals, but honestly it’s a pretty heavy track?

    //

    This song was one I learned three or four different wrong ways before realllly reading it closely today and playing it in open G tuning (except for that high E string) so it’s DGDGBE which really is more like “dropped D and G” I guess, and it’s very much the “Rich Robinson wants to play like Keith Richards” tuning, but I am here for it.

    There are, uh, more guitars because I like chaos, but there are at least two tracks of the electric played through the Heavy Metal™ pedal.

    Sometimes I reflect a little bit on how, as a teenager, I had to figure out chords for myself, buy guitar magazines with a handful of transcriptions in each, or buy whole songbooks (and fake books) at music stores… and now it takes (well, in theory) just a few seconds because internet.

    This one is mostly written up on the internet in standard tuning, but having read before that it’s in Open G Sort Of, I found a couple forum posts and more than one video lesson about how to play it.

    And the drums are a bit silly, but the drums are still hard for me to freehand.

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  • day 196: 9 to 5

    9 to 5, by Dolly Parton.

    The older I get, the more I feel this socialist anthem in my bones. 😉

    As a kid, I didn’t really get the full picture painted by the lyrics, so I just picked up the cartoonish meaning of this song (and the movie? I think I probably saw the movie.)

    //

    I think I’ve tried this before, I but I was really feeling it tonight, and whatever capo-induced key this is in was working for me, with a kinda Sturgill Simpson vibe.

    It deserves the piano track, but I don’t have time tonight.

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  • day 195: Wild World

    Wild World, by Cat Stevens.

    This song was certainly imprinted on my consciousness sometime early in life — a quick check of ye olde Wikipedia says it predates me by a handful of years, and seems like a given it would’ve been kicking around the radio on a regular basis when I was but a li’l tyke.

    idk, in some of these numbers, Cat Stevens seems like kinda of a jerk? Like, a hippie boyfriend who bids you good riddance and tells you he’ll always remember you as a child?

    //

    Tired one for a tired night, but the silly little riffs were cute.

  • day 194: Country Feedback

    Country Feedback, by REM.

    This song has been on my personal karaoke list ever since I read a story about live band karaoke and someone sang this and I just thought wow that sounds cathartic as heck I should belt this sucker out but also I am not Michael Stipe, a well established fact.

    Out of Time was everybody’s REM record, even if you hadn’t been that into Green, except for getting told by condescending Georgian proto-alternakids at summer camp that “Orange Crush isn’t about the soda, man” but this one, it was unavoidable on MTV several months in a row, and definitely all that summer, with the B-52s and KRS-One mixed in a weird culture mash, but also it’s a really, really good album, and there a bunch of songs on here (Belong!!! Half a World Away! Me In Honey!!) that hold up wildly well 30 years later. (Typing that last part literally sent a chill up my spine.)

    //

    Gotta have an overly distorted guitar futzing around on the second half, says so right there in the song title. I don’t make the rules, kids.

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  • day 193: Blue Moon

    Blue Moon, by Elvis Presley.

    Um, I guess it’s “In My Feels”-structure week here at the ol’ songs365 project, but there you have it.

    Obviously a cover-of-a-cover, but who wrote Blue Moon, really?

    [wikipedia noises]

    Oh, it’s Rodgers and Hart, and not controversial, I guess. OK! Seems like they kept trying to use the melody in musicals where it didn’t fit, and oh, just to tie it together with Mystery Train, the Elvis version of this song appears in the Jarmusch movie as a plot device. I hope that’s not a spoiler. I prefer Down By Law, anyway.

    //

    Just one extra guitar and one extra vocal because I am trying to get better at adding fewer things when it makes more sense. The Elvis record is sparse AF, although listening to it now on headphones, there’s a bunch of reverby echoey stuff going on in the vocal, which I imagine was some fun physical analog tape trick, or a characteristic of the actual space. Also it sounds like somebody is playing two coconuts, Holy Grail-style, to make it sound like a cowboy movie.

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