songs:365

  • day 147: Oom Sha La La

    Oom Sha La La, by Haley Heynderickx.

    I really love this song.

    What can I say, it was my 2019 Jam of the Year™ for sure, even though it came out in 2018, and I’ve probably listened to it more in the past couple years than anything else except that Fleet Foxes album last year.

    To be fair, I’ve had a garden in the backyard for years, and yes, it’s quite therapeutic to work on, and yes, I was out there clipping some cute little microgreens today. (This just means I plant too late for anything to be useful when it starts getting hot, so we always have “microgreens” instead of full-size kale, spinach, and chard.)

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    Lots of extra vocals on the Oom Sha La Las, and even though I know the chords online are wrong for the bridge-ish part, and even though I knew the right way to play them, I still mucked it up horribly. And some MIDI piano and percussion, because it can’t hurt. Much.

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  • day 146: Landslide

    Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac.

    I mean, if it’s going to be Vulnerable Week, might as well go all in, right?

    I’m sure I heard this one thousands of times growing up, but for some reason the image that pops into my head when I hear this somehow involves a pizza parlor in New Jersey (or Pennsylvania??) where it came on while we were eating during a film job (??!?!) — none of that makes a lot of sense, and chances are good if that memory is accurate, I was vegan at the time, but idk, for whatever reason I am transported to that long-tabled pizza place now when I hear this song.

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    Two guitars, two vocals. I’ve been messing around with adjusted Echo effects on the main vocal/guitar track a lot lately. There’s a phrase an adult cousin of mine used sometime in the early 2000s when my wife and I were staying with her a couple nights in New York… she was talking about “music today” and I think the phrase was “an echo chamber to disguise their lack of talent” and I mean, she’s not wrong, but also, I have no shame, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

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  • day 145: Lua

    Lua, by Bright Eyes.

    Feeling vulnerable this week, y’all… did you notice? This song is one of seven or eight on this album that break my heart every time. I think I wrote about this earlier in the year when I did a more upbeat Conor Oberst song, to be fair, so you were warned.

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    Used the MIDI keyboard for the first time in a bit and tried out some little underlying synth thing, but it wasn’t really coming off, and the vocal was too quiet to really layer in much of anything, so I switched it to a drippy little piano and called it a night.

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  • day 144: Strong Enough

    Strong Enough, by Sheryl Crow.

    That Sheryl Crow record was the sort of thing that was fun until that one song was absolutely everywhere — kinda like when Mr. Fortgang printed the songsheets for Livin’ On A Prayer, and suddenly it was everyone’s song? When you’re a kid, and you don’t realize what you like is popular, and then, like you see your nemesis(es) singing your song and it’s so unfair.

    This song has some deadly lines, but also sounds like it belongs in the “giving up a vice to become a better person for my new significant other” montage of a 1990s dark romantic dry comedy, I guess?

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    But I don’t get to poke any fun at it all, because I mucked up the chorus like eight of nine times across three takes. A little tired over here tonight, on the 144th day of 2021.

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  • day 143: Swingin’ Party

    Swingin’ Party, by the Replacements.

    I have a few potential Replacements tracks on the list, but this song is one that always hit me as vulnerable as it gets. Paul Westerberg is always kinda “here’s my soul and I’m bearing it so transparently that I have to get really drunk to sing these songs” which isn’t necessarily productive, per se.

    That time I saw Paul Westerberg live, touring behind 14 Songs, which itself was almost like touring behind the Singles soundtrack, as far as I was concerned… I half-joke that’s the show where I picked up a rock and roll ear — as in, the hearing in my left ear was affected by standing too close on the left side of the stage during a very loud show at The Edge in Fort Lauderdale. I think I drove myself to that one alone, and felt lonely, and other than the guy at the record store (who was there that night!) who provided me with instructions regarding this band, I had no one to listen to this music with, really, so it was just mine, Hold My Life and and Achin’ To Be, and all the angst and waiting and patience and awkward romance of teenagedom, just aspiring to the freedom of twentiesdom, with no real end in sight.

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    Probably the last hotel number for a while!

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  • day 142: Raining Tacos

    Raining Tacos, by Parry Gripp.

    When in Rome…*

    *where Rome = traveling with a ten-year-old boy.

    I have heard this song sung by my child far more often than the original, but tbqh, it kinda slaps? Stay away from the sequels if you can help it, but I assure you, there is definitely a market for simple electronic music aimed at 7-11 year-old children.

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    Hmm, my ice bucket tripod rig seems to be less stable as the humidity level in the room decreases…

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  • day 141: On the Road Again

    On the Road Again, by Willie Nelson.

    First night on the road in 2021, so this is a little on the nose. 😉 When I started this project and the question of what I would do when I started traveling again for work came up, I did not anticipate that I would be traveling for youth soccer first. But here we are, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, just outside Charlotte, after a long day on the road.

    This song might’ve been the very first Willie song I ever heard, even before the Red Headed Stranger cassette took its turn on repeat around my Dad. Feels like it’s been watered down by a thousand commercial uses (full credit to Willie for being a player, though), but what few lyrics there are hit a little harder now. I changed the “gypsies” reference the second time through, and should’ve skipped it the first time, too. C’mon, Willie.

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    Uh, if the video quality is better on my iPhone 11 than on my 2017 MBP camera, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The audio is comically acceptable, though. I supposed millions of influencers talking into their ringlights can’t be wrong.

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  • day 140: Man on the Moon

    Man on the Moon, by REM.

    Took 140 days to get to REM, one of the most important bands of my teenage years? It’s not that I heard Green for the first time at summer camp, but that’s where the kids from North Carolina and Georgia taught me that it was Important Music, and that Orange Crush was about Vietnam, man, not soda.

    I knew that. I got it, man.

    There came a point (again, the record store work, employee discount, and $8.98 bargain bin helped) where I owned every REM album, right up until Monster came out my freshman year of college — honestly, that’s the first CD I remember buying at Tower Records on W. 4th Street.

    This song wasn’t a meaningful favorite, but it’s one that sticks in my head today, yeah yeah yeah yeah. Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk.

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    Late decision to add a bassline saved this thing. Also, I can not sing the harmony parts. Which Mike is it with the high voice? Mills? Is there a second Mike? I don’t remember all the details, but I can tell you which road I was driving on when Belong started meaning something to me, and that it was a tape playing in the boom box in my first car, etc., etc., etc.

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  • day 139: I Shall Be Released

    I Shall Be Released, by The Band*.

    Yes, indeed, it is a cover-of-a-cover, but that is sometimes the case the the Dylan/Band overlaps. I am way, way, way more familiar with The Band’s version, so that’s what this song is for me.

    I spent a lot of time listening to The Band on a discman in Morocco — at least until I really got into the Gnaoua CD I picked up in Marrakech. This song might’ve been on one of those Band CDs I had on repeat when I hiked, alone, into the scrub outside Tinghir (Tenerhir) and left the tourist trail, scrambled up the rocks, and spent the night in what was clearly some goatherd’s regular campsite.

    In the middle of the night, I woke once to the sound of bleating animals strolling by on the path; I woke up a hundred more times to the light of the moon in my eyes. (The ultralight tarp in my daypack was not enough to block it out; the clementines and almonds I brought were sufficient nourishment, though.)

    The walk back through the date farms was a highlight of that trip, but I’ll save that for another song.

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  • day 138: We Are 138

    We Are 138, by the Misfits.

    I couldn’t resist. Look, the thing is, I have heard this song more often than I have made it through THX-1138 without falling asleep. Honestly, it’s pretty boring! Lotta white, tbqh. Not that I didn’t attempt a weird homage to it in film school, because that was the sort of thing I did. My sci-fi short remained unfinished, never as overexposed as I wanted it, but it was the moment, thankfully, I realized the last thing I should do for a career was talk to actors. Animation would’ve suited me better.

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    Actual electric guitar for the first time in a long time, and it came out kinda appropriate! Just one vocal, the tiny solo, and another electric guitar track transposed down as bass.

    Oh, and dumb video effects.

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