songs:365

  • 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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  • day 192: Bad

    Bad, by U2.

    This song has been on one list or another for years. I don’t think I ever learned it on guitar as a teenager, though it seems pretty simple now, honestly! It’s a little, uh, emo for karaoke, I guess? So I’d probably never sung it end to end without the record until now.

    Kinda feel like I got the guitar parts right, if a little extra muddled with reverb. The second vocal isn’t totally necessary, but there were a few obvious moments where it covered up some errors.

    Also, did I record this U2 song before the England-Italy Euros final to jinx the English? Maybe. Maybe I did. Maybe. Maybe yes. Yes. Yes I did.

    //

    Worth noting: My cover is only 7 seconds longer than the record.

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  • day 191: What Light

    What Light, by Wilco.

    Believe it or not, it’s been a couple months between Wilco songs? Seems unlikely, I know, but according to my (spreadsheet) records, it seems true.

    This song is one I’ve probably sung in exactly two places: This basement, and the car. Well, maybe a variety of cars, since I guess this dates back to our Honda Civic days in Santa Cruz? Before that car — the “loss leader” at the used car sale in the mall parking lots, the car that let them say “as low as $4,700” although that seems steep even now for a 6-year-old Civic DX two-door with no air conditioning, not that we needed any in Santa Cruz — anyway, yes, before that car, we took the bus and/or bicycled where we needed to go.

    The Honda, weirdly though, had a six CD changer, in the trunk. This meant investing in a spindle of blank CDs and a box of slim jewel boxes which we still have not used up, some 17 years after buying the car. Sky Blue Sky might’ve been one I bought early on, anyway, and never pirated on a torrent or anything, because we seem to own a copy on CD.

    Also this song is borderline Sesame Street material, and that just makes me love it more. (Oh, and there’s nothing more confusing to me than an “A#” in the chords where a “Bb” would be quicker for my brain to process.)

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  • day 190: Everybody Knows

    Everybody Knows, by Leonard Cohen.

    I think I wrote a little about this when I wrote about another Leonard Cohen track, but this song was my route into his music, by way of the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack — or, well, the movie, because I think the soundtrack might have the Concrete Blonde cover? Which is fine. But this is the Leonard Cohen version, all keyboards and synths and pumping beat, like some Wim Wenders 1980s black and white lens. (Why do I associate the I’m Your Man album so strongly with Wings of Desire? Does he use it in there somewhere? Or is it just the whole First We Take Manhattan aesthetic?)

    Anyway, it’s a little cynical! “Everybody Knows” was a big part of my worldview as a teenager, and sat neatly along side the U2 Zoo TV tour video screen epigrams like “Everything You Know Is Wrong” when I started writing in my own secret poetry/journals in high school.

    //

    Lots of layers here, including like 4 different drum loops just mashed in there together, and a synth, and a bass synth, and some high sorta bells synth, and the unnecessary guitar, and a few vocals, including a “deep like Leonard” track.

    I messed up one of the later verses coming out of the little solo/break thing, and I’m not sure how, but it’s one of those compounding mistakes as I add layers and follow along with my own mess. I just went with it. Nothing like biffing the biblical verse, eh? [extremely nervous laughter]

    Also, how the heck is my version like 1:45 longer than the record??

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  • day 189: The Man In Me

    The Man In Me, by Bob Dylan.

    This song is off the Big Lebowski soundtrack, as far as I’m concerned, which earns it a special place in our household, while also being non-Lebowski obscure enough that I have never heard it any other place in my life that I can recall.

    //

    Played it loud, sang it loud, added a noodly guitar and an appropriate organ.

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  • day 188: Just The Two Of Us

    Just The Two Of Us, by Grover Washington, Jr.*

    *and Bill Withers! Hard to know who to credit on this song, which I did not ever understand was put out by the saxophonist — this is Puro Love 94 material right here — on a 1980 album, rather than something from Mr. Withers himself.

    Sometimes, I just crack open the “Top 100” on the site/app where I look up guitar chords for these songs, and see what’s popular with the kids these days. Inevitably, it’s 1) Current pop songs I’ve never heard, 2) Current pop songs by artists I have heard, like Olivia Rodrigo this week, 3) Can’t Help Falling In Love, always in the top three songs, 4) Classic Rock, 5) Creep, 6) Other assorted love songs, like this one.

    I don’t want to talk about the saxophone run, or the weird bridge chords underneath it. I’m not sure F13 exists, and you can’t prove it does. What the heck is a 13th, anyway? Probably not real, unless that chord was invented during a union strike. (This is a wildly obscure joke about my college dorm.)