songs:365

Month: November 2021

  • day 314: Modern Girl

    Modern Girl, by Sleater-Kinney.

    Carrie Brownstein’s guitar tone ranks right up there with Stephen Malkmus’s when it comes to my gear goals, but I opted for the easy ironic acoustic track tonight. This song is the angriest pretty song I can think of, though there are others.

    //

    The most popular version of the chords to this song online is very wrong, so I played it in the right key, but probably the wrong way, with a capo to make the changes very very simple.

    That makes 10 days in a row of songs by modern girls, to borrow the phrase, and I don’t have too many more in the backlog. I’ll see if I can make up another theme for the next 10 days, but I think “full send” is pretty much the theme for the last 51 days of the year.

  • day 313: Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)

    Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), by the Eurythmics.

    I was not much less than Today Years Old when I realized that “Eurythmics” is like because EURO and RHYTHMIC although I understood the second part already, sure.

    This song is something I heard when it was contemporary, sure, but for whatever reason there’s one time I most specifically remember hearing it, that freshman year of college when we went to clubs for a few weekends in a row, and one late Saturday night into Sunday morning, as the crowd thinned out, the bass in this song made it sound like a house remix, but I don’t think it was? And I think it had snowed while we were inside, so when we left the club, it was already light out, but that bright gray of a snowy quiet morning in New York City, and we took a cab back to our dorm.

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  • day 312: Cuz I Love You

    Cuz I Love You, by Lizzo.

    Lizzo was one of the first names I wrote down on the list at the start of this project. This song or Juice, it was always going to be one or the other. A coworker turned me onto Lizzo early, like 2016, and it’s been a joy to listen to her and see her deservedly get very very very much fame. (A second runner up: Jerome, which is so much fun to sing.)

    //

    This came out… serviceable? Not bad for the second or third time I played the song all the way through? Took me a minute to realize you’re supposed to play all four chords in a row and not just three, and that messed me up most of the time.

    I think the important thing, and the important thing about this project, is to just try to throw it down, and put your heart into the parts that you’re best at. If the rest isn’t perfect, so be it, but grind out the bits that make you feel something in between. I saved this song for too long, hoping to put more time into it or do it some special justice, but now that we’re running low on days in this year — and let me tell you, it has gone by many times faster than the curséd 2020 — I am in a hurry to line up the last 50 days or so and make sure I get in the remaining favorites on my list.

  • day 311: Total Eclipse of the Heart

    Total Eclipse of the Heart, by Bonnie Tyler.

    Yes, this song, too, loomed large in my early life, and then I didn’t think about it much until it surged back into Gen X / Millennial karaoke consciousness in the 2010s. Definitely one of those cases where you’re mildly surprised that everyone else knows a song, until you remember it was everywhere on the radio and early MTV.

    I made an attempt to do a video for the backup vocal that I could inset into the main video, but the original video didn’t properly record, and I had to do everything again, and didn’t bother with it. The guitar solo is one mediocre take, though!

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  • day 310: Sweet Jane

    Sweet Jane, by the Cowboy Junkies.

    [record scratch, freeze frame]

    Yup, that’s me, recording another #cover-of-a-cover to keep things femme in November. Not sure how many more I can do in a row, but this song is one I’ll take in any of its many forms. The Cowboy Junkies version was one I heard around the first record store I worked at, and looking it up just now, it’s obviously because it was on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. (Apologies to everyone who had forgotten about that movie. I had, too!)

    There was also some sort of live Velvet Underground reunion record in the 90s, I think? I think they did more of what the Cowboy Junkies cover here when they played it live, I guess. Even if you don’t get to say the hokey “and some people like us go to a Velvet Underground concert” line doing this version, it has some super nice parts. (That I messed up, but still.)

    This might be a nice one to take another run at with the electric and the proper amount of reverb.

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  • day 309: 99 Red Balloons

    99 Red Balloons, by Nena.

    This song is one of the very first non-Muppet songs I remember wanting to hear on the radio, on the jukebox, wherever I could, as a pretty small kid.

    It’s the kind of song I forget about for a decade at a time ever since, and probably hadn’t thought about it until I stumbled across it online recently and added it to the list.

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  • day 308: Fast Car

    Fast Car, by Tracy Chapman.

    This song is from some peak MTV period, so the main angle in the video of Tracy Chapman singing is burned in my brain. All nostalgia and jokes aside, this is an amazing song, still hits hard, and the guitar riff does a lot of work. I am obviously only getting it right in the spirit, and I definitely don’t know how to properly get into the chorus, but by the end of it, I kinda figured it out, I think? It’s also longer than I remember. Or I sing too slow.

  • day 307: Night Shift

    Night Shift, by Lucy Dacus.

    Really making an effort to clear out the women-singing-indie-rock backlog here, because that makes up such a massive percentage of my casual listening, and all my favorite songs from the past few years fit firmly in that category.

    This song is still Lucy Dacus’s biggest “hit” by “gets mentioned a lot on All Songs Considered” standards, and rightfully so, despite being, apparently, like more than six minutes long? Probably a lot better than some of the six-minute Dylan tracks I’ve recorded, frankly. The first part of the song is harder to get right, but the repeated chorus at the end is lots of fun.

  • day 306: Are You With Me Now

    Are You With Me Now, by Cate Le Bon.

    This song was probably the first one I heard from Cate Le Bon, but I listened to her a bunch in the past couple years and know absolutely nothing about her. OK, read Wikipedia, and now I know she’s Welsh! Her stuff is kinda moody and airy and is the kind of music you hear and think it might be from 1967 except it sounds like much more modern production. I’m into it.

    (And I didn’t do a great job with it, but it was worth trying.)

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  • day 305: Solitary Daughter

    Solitary Daughter, by Bedouine.

    This song is an instant departure from spoopy season to more sensitive climes, as the weather cools on the first of November, and we recover from candy crashes in darkened rooms.

    2021 Jam of the Year contender, for me, except that it’s actually not from their new album and dates from 2017, even if this was the year I got into it.

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