The fun thing about spending the day in the ocean is that no one can hear you mumbling songs to yourself in the waves. Also, literally choking on the lines about Jesus while wearing my Interfaith t-shirt is a little on the nose, even for me!
This song is the stuff of Leonard Cohen puzzles — who is it about? What does it mean? A lot of tea and citrus come from China, Leonard, etc.
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Recorded on the porch with the “Happy Hour” and “New Orleans” signs, and the cute string of bare light bulb looking things. And a ceiling fan, and Route 12 in the background. Had to go back to YT to get this uploaded properly.
Welcome to the beach. We’re on vacation, but the show must go on. This song is probably the first Freakwater song I fell for, and the one that jumps into my head most often.
Is this song Vampire Weekend’s most punk number? Except that it’s about Cape Cod? We’re headed to the beach on vacation, but nobody writes songs about the Outer Banks. Hmm, well, maybe there are pirate songs about Cape Hatteras? Probably.
This happened today because the 14-year-old and I were listening to VW in the car back and forth to the grocery store, and I decided I would try a totally different, much more recent song, and there were too many hard barre chords, and my wrist wasn’t up for it, so I went through all their songs alphabetically and tried a bunch of stuff until I got to the letter W.
I feel like there are probably better songs about what adolescence feels like — or at least what it felt like for me in the late 1980s, when I would’ve been thirteen, deeply in love with any girl who would slow dance with me.
But this song does a pretty good job of it. I have to admit, my relationship with Big Star, until Alex Chilton died, started and ended with the name-checking Replacements song, Alex Chilton. There’s a great Waxahatchee cover of this song, of course.
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.
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Some of these songs are long, y’all. I’m going to do something shorter tomorrow.
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.
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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!
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.