Half As Much, by Hank Williams.
This song came on in the car for like 4 seconds before I pulled into the driveway a little while ago, and I immediately started belting it out, so here we are.
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Played it a full step up so I could play the A harp along with it in E.
That makes three Hank Williams songs and zero Hank Williams III songs. Gotta fix that soon…
Bird On The Wire, by Leonard Cohen.
Not Tom Waits, not Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, all wounded and sweet and fragile and all that. Wore that hat because it felt right, not because I wanted to do it cowboy-style.
Losing It, by Belle and Sebastian.
This song gets stuck in my head whenever I listen to Tigermilk, but the whole album is so darn catchy that the whole thing is in my ears just from looking at the cover today.
I’ve been cataloging my record collection, really for the first time in any serious way, using Discogs, and it’s been a fun and weird experience. Sure, I mean, yes, I bought some of these 25 years ago, or nearly that many, and so given the resulting supply and demand, blah blah blah, carry the one, and some of these records are worth real money! Might’ve needed to catch my breath after the price for this album showed up in the app, but I don’t have the original pressing, but the reissue is still worth something meaningful.
The thing is, stuff from the 1970s (or older) when records were the primary vehicle for music consumption? Not rare. Rarely rare. There were plenty of copies of Let It Be around, and they’re not worth anything.
But Pavement albums that I bought on vinyl when they were released? Ooh. Aah. And that one GBV record that turned out to be everyone’s favorite, but I got the white vinyl version (1 of 300 made?!?!?) for $7.98 at Etherea on Ave. A? Ooooooh. Aaaaaaahhhhhh.
Etherea is long gone, but on one of my passes through my old NYC neighborhood in recent years, I found it had been replaced by a lovely and well-lit bookstore, where I purchased what I hope was a meaningful gift for a colleague. Today I also had the nice surprise of finding an Adult Crash price tag on an indie rock record, looking it up, and realizing that they were the record store in the Etherea place before they took over.
It’s also neat to find Other Music price tags and know there’s a whole documentary about that store, and also to relive some travels to Amoeba in Berkeley, Bow Wow in Albuquerque, etc. There’s probably a Princeton Records find in here somewhere.
The Crystal Ship, by The Doors.
The Doors catalog was so important to me in my teenage years, high on the list of “things I used to listen to multiple times a week that I never hear anymore.” Is that normal? Maybe. How many of are still listening to your teenage music on repeat?
This song was always somewhere between a throwaway and an epic, I think? Like on the record it’s a relatively quiet and quick thing, but live versions might jam out for a while. OK, let’s get real, it’s a makeout song.
Keeping it quick tonight. Started learning and rehearsing one of my favorites today, but I need a weekend day to do it right. (Oh, pre-gaming the songs is not common, but I do try things in advance. I record each song in one day.)
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, by Bob Dylan.
What if we just leaned into Dylan? Are you leaning? Keep leaning. Leeeeeeean a little more… Oh, my, that’s too far, now you’re falling into Dylan. And, you’re on the ground.
This song was such a fun scandal as a teenager, just a hop, skip, & jump to the left of Why Don’t We Do It In The Road, which I once snuck into the playlist at a summer camp dance for about 14 seconds.
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MOAR HARP.
Messed around and made some video editing efforts so you can enjoy me playing the harp instead of the phantom backing track. Please also accept this as proof that I once read and practiced at least two pages of Country and Blues Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless (Klutz Books).
Blue Ridge Mountains, by Fleet Foxes.
Finally tackled this song! Not as easy as it looks! And it doesn’t look that easy! One of those songs that feels meaningful but isn’t really something I personally relate to, except that I’m in the Blue Ridge Mountains often enough, and there’s a dog mentioned, and that’s all it takes to set me off with a song in my head, really.
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Did the camera video + microphone audio again, but then added more guitar and vocal tracks on top of it, plus the first use of the MIDI keyboard in weeks for the bass, other keyboard noises that are probably supposed to be mandolins or whatever, and some other bits. Dropping the drum loop(s) out of the quiet parts in the edit is my favorite thing to do.
Untitled, by REM. (The one from Green.)
Apparently this song is the third REM number of the year! Not at all one I had intentions about, but I just stumbled across it on an REM chords site and thought it fit my mood right now pretty well, and it required actual audio production, though I still used the phone for video, which honestly wasn’t hard.
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Enough reverb and delay for you?
Long Black Veil, by The Band.
Another not-quite-a-Johnny-Cash-song, but my intent here was to cover The Band’s version of this song, which, actually, quite a bit like Thirteen, sounds like a dark country standard, but it isn’t! I mean, it is now, but it was written for Nashville, not out of some standard Americana.
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Did not stick to my plan to go the incrementally less lazy route to record tonight, and for my trouble, the computer fell asleep halfway through the last verse, and I couldn’t remember the final lines, so I had to make another edit.
Thirteen, by Johnny Cash.
Um, I think this is the first post in this project to really require a disambiguation section, maybe? Because this song is one Johnny Cash recorded, after (I assume Rick Rubin?) asked Danzig to write one for him. So it’s a Danzig song, but not really a #cover-of-a-cover? Says a lot of good things about Danzig that it sounds like an old standard, and obviously the kind of thing Johnny Cash would sing.
But also, I think it might be the first song in this project to repeat a title from a previous song? I haven’t been keeping track.
And, yes, it’s Friday the 13th, which I didn’t (consciously) notice when picking this from a list of songs on American Recordings (vol. 1), or playing it.
Also, yes, back home with the black hat, and resolving to switch back to the real microphone and whatnot. Tomorrow. Probably.
Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound, by Tom Paxton.
I know this song best as a Nanci Griffith cover, though I spotted it this morning in a list of Johnny Cash covers, as I looked to do something East Tennessee-appropriate, keeping in mind I’ve already recorded the two Dolly Parton songs I know best.
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Probably the last song from the road for a while!