Buckets of Rain, by Bob Dylan.
This song is for the dog, I guess? She doesn’t have much time left, and this popped into my head about her today.
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Can you see the flop sweat? I definitely have a cold, which is why Dylan made sense, too. And it’s a lot faster than an instrumental.
I’ll have to try this again in the fancy open tuning Dylan uses instead of my cheapo chords here.
Float On, by Modest Mouse.
You can’t really blame me for making this one sound sad when it has all those minor chords! Who put those in this happy song? I guess that’s the point.
This song instantly puts me in our old Honda, commuting the short distance to my first job here in Virginia, driving through our first neighborhood of renters and migrants and people like us starting over somewhere, having kids, trying to move forward.
We spent the snowiest winter on record for the DC area there, pregnant and shoveling and making hot chocolate for the neighbors and shoveling and looking for a house and seeing ours right after the third major snowstorm of that winter, almost into spring, and I remember walking through knee-deep snow around the side.
We didn’t know the back yard had a pond in it until we saw the pictures at closing.
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I might have a little cold, so the next few days could get a little quiet and/or instrumental.
Woods, by Bon Iver.
Welp, this started with me browsing through Kanye West songs, looking for something I could do without too much appropriative discomfort, landing on Lost in the World, looking at the Bon Iver version to try and get the chords right, getting a little enamored with the little intro I saw tabbed out, and spending a good solid two hours tonight recording and mixing all these silly vocals after spending some idle time today downloading various plugins and effects that are not the thing you really need to sound like this song, and in the end I’m pretty happy with the end product here.
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Processing this one made my computer fan hum a little bit.
If I still do the Kanye version, it will be both a cover-of-a-cover and a remix of this recording, OK? OK.
The Harder They Come, by Jimmy Cliff.
Rites of passage for college dorm rooms in the ’90s included… well, there was a long list, but a substantial amount of musical attention was paid to reggae in our undergrad years, and the movie The Harder They Come was an early centerpiece, as was its soundtrack. Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker — all introduced.
This song didn’t loom as large in our mythology as certain Toots numbers, and we’ll get to those, but it’s awfully playable.
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Restrung the acoustic, but couldn’t resist adding an electric track, too, though I didn’t really attempt a percussive reggae thing with it.
Resisted the urge to add a software horn section, but I might not hold back next time.
(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem) by Car Seat Headrest.
Even if this song is somehow not relatable for you, it’s relatable. Of everything I like about Car Seat Headrest, my favorite thing is that this kid is literally from here, like, the next town over from where I live, and lived around here while my family lived around here, and like, maybe I know people that know his parents or whatever. And it’s fun to get a nice angsty view of the suburbs where you live and know that the kid who wrote this song was referring to a finite number of high schools and cops and characters, and it’s not hard to imagine them playing their roles in the continuing suburban melodrama, and even then, it’s a nice familiar story.
(And honestly after like 60 seconds of Googling, I really do probably know people who know his parents, and they seem like good folks and his biggest fans.)
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Sometimes, like last night, I really have to listen to the song before/during recording to get certain parts “right” enough to be happy with them, or to kinda fact check the melody, but most nights, as you may have noticed, I don’t even pretend to bother with it, and then it’s a fun surprise to see if I did certain parts more or less like the record.
A fresh set of acoustic strings arrived this evening, but not before I had begun work on this with multiple electric tracks, and hey, just a reminder, playing electric guitar is lots of fun.
Parasol, by The Sea And Cake.
This song is one I have wanted to play all the way through for a good solid 25 years, so this is pretty satisfying, even with all the fumbling before the chorus.
The Sea And Cake is one of my favorite bands ever. Truly. You’ve probably never heard of them, and that’s fine. Yes, I know what I sound like. This is another band my indie rock friends back home in Miami got me into the summer after Freshman year of college. When I went back to school in the fall, it was CMJ season, and one of them made the trip up, took me to this Too Pure showcase at Wetlands, and we saw The Sea And Cake, and I kinda think Pram and Laika and idk but it was pretty amazing. I got the setlist. I lit Sam’s cigarette for him. He seemed pretty drunk, but then again, that was kinda his thing. Seeming that way, anyway.
Parasol is the song they closed shows with (I saw them as many times as I could after that night), off their second album, and from my perspective, always kinda cryptic to be everyone’s favorite? But I loved it.
Once, I swear, they played a show at Tramps — I don’t think this was the night they played there with Tortoise and 5ivestyle (and closed with a mind-melting all-hands Grazing in the Grass with like dueling vibraphone thingies omg), I think this was a different show, like, right after a new album was released, and it was… not great? The new songs didn’t sound super rehearsed, and they seemed all out of whack, and I swear to this day, they cut it a little short, played Parasol, and during the chorus, Sam sang “caught us on an off night, we’re in tune and that’s all” but how can that really have happened? I don’t think it really happened.
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Hey I found a guitar with six strings that stays in tune, and it’s my electric. Pretty neat trick! Extremely pleased with how the guitars came out, again, despite me not really knowing how to play the pre-chorus bit right, and not having the patience to keep watching the live YouTube video I found to figure it out, after having figured out which F# and E they’re playing for the chorus, which was pretty crucial.
Layered on a buncha stuff, but didn’t attempt to ruin it with drums, because I am no John McEntire.
Blank Space, by Taylor Swift.
…but obviously I’m covering the Ryan Adams cover.
Why? Because it’s in a key I can deal with, and an expectation I can deal with, and instrumentation I can deal with, including this guitar that’s still missing a high E string, because tonight I decided to just replace the one string real quick and looked for strings and realize all I have are electric strings, which probably also need changing, so it’s time to get some acoustic strings.
Stay tuned. (ha)
When Ryan Adams put out his album that was a cover of the Taylor Swift album, this song was my favorite, but I liked the whole thing a ton, and said so, and said something about how it took Ryan Adams to get me into Taylor Swift, and I got absolutely roasted on Twitter because I shouldn’t need a dude to get me into songs that Taylor Swift wrote, and it’s true, and I feel like I’ve done my penance by singing backup on Shake It Off at karaoke a lot in the past few years?
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I have a Ryan Adams story, but it’s confusing and hard to track down evidence online that this happened.
But, briefly: One of the last music videos I worked on in New York City in the summer of 2001 was a Ryan Adams video. I don’t really remember the song, but we filmed him riding around in a limo all over town and sorta partying. I don’t remember shooting him playing the song.
And then Sept. 11 happened, and instead of that limo video, the “I’ll always love you New York” video with the city in the background came out.
So that was a weird experience.
Harlan, by Freakwater.
It seems unfair to record the one Freakwater song that the dude in the band sings, but I’ve always loved singing it, and it’s easy, and I needed something easy tonight. This song isn’t as iconic as Picture In My Mind, which should be next on my list for this band, but it’s certainly timeless.
And I checked, and it’s not a cover-of-a-cover, but maybe Harlan (1998) fits somewhere in the mythology with Goin’ Back To Harlan (Emmylou Harris / Anna McGarrigle, 1995), and You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive (Darrell Scott, 1997), or maybe Harlan, Kentucky just loomed large as an Americana symbol town in the mid-1990s?
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Did I have time today to restring the acoustic? Nope.
Did I start recording long past 9:30pm? Yep.
Did I want to play this song without a high E string? Nope.
Did I take the sticky, high action, hard to stay in tune big ol’ Blueridge acoustic I played from years 16-40 of my life out of the closet? Yep.
Did it stay in tune? Nope.
Did I play a little solo anyway? Yep.
Jemima Surrender, by The Band.
I kinda felt bad about how terrible this came out until I read the Wikipedia page about this song, saw that everyone was playing out of position, and now can’t decide if I should feel worse because The Band just screwing around in the studio with a fun over-the-top song is so much better than me, or, more likely, if I should just feel good about getting this in the can after a bunch of false starts, continuing to play with yesterday’s broken/missing string, the electric guitar bit sounding kinda wanky, my vocals leaving much to be desired, but I gotta tell you, I don’t really care tonight, and I’m exhausted, and not every song can be Bon Iver.
Blood Bank, by Bon Iver.
Whoooooooooooo wheeeeeeee we are getting into it now, when it comes to songs I’ve been singing along with for years but never had the fortitude to really look up and try to play.
I left the acoustic in the weird Fleet Foxes tuning last night, and looked for something similar tonight, but also kinda wanted to play something by The Band, and gave Jemima Surrender a couple false starts (it’s just in dropped D tho) before dinner. Came back after the kids’ bedtime, gave a Pavement song a shot, put it on the list for later, and kept spelunking for anything near this tuning that I could pull off, Dylan and Stones aside.
Lo and behold, my favorite Bon Iver song is in an even weirder tuning if you believe what you read on the internet. I just played this song in DG#CGG* and the asterisk is because it’s supposed to be a D but I finally broke a dang string.
Fittingly enough, I was flipping through guitar videos on Insta (my one remaining Facebook-owned vice/communication de-vice), and saw two things: 1) a TikTok about changing your dang strings, and 2) an old video of BB King (not my favorite but whatevs) playing some Gospel blues, on stage, and changing out his broken high E string while singing and no one else missed a beat.
Inspirational! So I broke a string.
And then I played this song, which I love.
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Also, ya gotta layer in the Oooooohs. A bunch of those, but just one backing vocal. Kinda feel like I got the right feeling, though. Weird tuned broke string guitar and a second guitar transposed down for a pumping bassline through the whole thing.
Feeling good about this one.