songs:365

  • day 107: Closer To Fine

    Closer To Fine, by Indigo Girls.

    If you didn’t go through an Indigo Girls phase in high school in the 1990s, you knew someone who did. (And I’m wrong to call it a phase — they’re still making music and people are still listening.)

    But… their first couple of albums were Very Important to people who were Very Important to me, and this song of course sticks in my psyche and memory more than the others, but don’t sleep on Galileo, Kid Fears, or of course their Romeo and Juliet cover, not ever.

    //

    I couldn’t quite get the chorus right, and my lack of harmony skills continues to bite me. Sometimes when I sing the lead vocal, I think I’m probably singing the harmony part, and then I go to record a second vocal and end up just doubling it.

    Also, this is probably not the first time someone sang an Indigo Girls song while wearing an American Outlaws t-shirt.

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  • day 106: Jack and Diane

    Jack and Diane, by John (Cougar) Mellencamp.

    This song came up in a thread this week about…. uhhhhmmmmm… Alvin and the Chipmunks? I’m… not going to explain.

    Anyway.

    Jack and Diane.

    I owned this album on vinyl when it was, like, contemporary? I was a small child. Loved this song, though. Literally have gone almost 40 years of my life without knowing the full lyrics to this in any way that approached accuracy, and I’ll forget the unimportant bits 30 seconds after it finishes uploading. “Suckin’ on chili dog” is the important part.

    //

    Got the microphone situation correct tonight, figured out a version of the little lick, doubled that one guitar part with something bigger, and added the silly drum fill, which is the happiest moment in it for me.

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  • day 105: Say You Love Me

    Say You Love Me, by Fleetwood Mac.

    Speaking of Love 94, Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and all variations thereof are Love 94 Yacht Rock in its purest form. As usual, my karaoke habits well precede the trending TikToks by a good solid 7 years, as I once stood up in front of a semi-friendly Louisville crowd and busted out what was then an “old man” song, Dreams, and full respect to the other guy about my age in the audience who was rocking out to it.

    This song, on the other hand, has just been in my head recently, and it took forever to figure out what it was called and find the chords for it. (HINT: It is not called “falling” or “when the loving starts” but it could be.)

    //

    So after multiple perfectly fine sound checks, I think I managed to unplug the good microphone, and judging by the stereo track in garageband, I think I might’ve accidentally recorded the vocal and guitar with the old iPhone headphone mic instead. But it was getting late, so I worked with it.

    You can also hear the dog come downstairs and catch a glimpse of her plopping down next to me on the couch. That’s a treat.

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  • day 104: Echos Myron

    Echos Myron, by Guided By Voices.

    Going to see bands with singers that spend the whole show drunk and stumbling are all sorts of fun in theory, but in practice, I don’t remember much of the time I saw GBV play Roseland in New York City… but when I look up their Roseland shows now, either I saw them open for Pavement in 1994 (?!?!?!?!) or I saw them play a CMJ show in 1999 with Jets to Brazil and Cheap Trick (!?!?!?!?!) and I really don’t see how either of those things are possible, but I remember seeing them at Roseland, so … ?!?!??!?!?

    This song might be the sweetest off of the album that came out at the moment when my indie rock friends back home in Miami were getting me into all the good indie rock the first (only) summer home from college.

    //

    Doubled the little solo at the end up an octave (uh, digitally), and I think it worked!

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  • day 103: You’re So Vain

    You’re So Vain, by Carly Simon.

    Have I talked about Love 94 yet? I probably have. The radio station that was on by default in our house for maybe the first 7 years of my life was focused on what we might now consider “soft rock” or mayyyybe “easy listening” depending on the decade, but then it was just pretty mainstream pop music, I think? Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Carly Simon, Irene Cara, maybe a little Journey, definitely Air Supply, certainly the Carpenters, etc.

    This song is one of a thousand I identify with that radio station, and the stereo system in the first house I lived in (yes, there was an 8-track player hooked up to it, but I have only the vaguest memory of us ever using it – the radio and my personal Fisher Price turntable were primary sources.)

    //

    Apparently it’s apostrophe-in-song-title week here? That just makes me nervous about special character escaping and backwards compatibility, but we’ll go with it.

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  • day 102: Walkin’ After Midnight

    Walkin’ After Midnight, by Patsy Cline.

    About a hundred years ago, during my second semester of college, I took a sound class where I made a few of my best friends for years after; but before we worked together on a Bukowski radio drama adaptation (of course), I used this song on an early project as the background-slash-setup to an audio punchline involving a guy looking for his dog.

    Patsy Cline sounds like music a very specific friend of my mom’s would’ve put me onto, but I don’t really remember the origin story of how I got into her Greatest Hits CD.

    //

    I think 100 songs was definitely the turning point where I’m craving some data about what I’ve been doing here.

    Yes, I have a spreadsheet, but beyond artist and song title, I’ve almost intentionally not gathered much. What would be interesting? I could use tags for artist, decade, genre… (heh, what do I love to argue about more than a genre taxonomy?)

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  • day 101: Johnny Mathis’ Feet

    Johnny Mathis’ Feet, by American Music Club.

    Today’s the day we find out what it sounds like when I point the microphone in the wrong direction! Spoiler: The guitar sounds great. The vocal, well, depends what you think of my vocals. I’m no Mark Eitzel, but I have a soft spot for this song and this album by American Music Club. It’s definitely another from the “heard this at the record store where I worked as a teenager” collection.

    A few (?) years later, I saw Eitzel play… somewhere? I feel like that was still in New York, maybe in some Knitting Factory space, but I’m also a little suspicious it was years (!) later in California? But not at the actual Great American Music Hall, though I did make it there with my wife to see a friend play in one of the premier Frank Zappa bands the week we got engaged.

    //

    This was my first favorite song off that album, but if you haven’t heard it, save some space for “I’ve Been A Mess.”

    Also, the apostrophe in the song title really needs to be one of those terrible s's jobs, but that would just leave me trying to write around it, and “I lay all my songs at the feet of Johnny Mathis” wouldn’t work nearly as well.

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  • day 100: Big Day Coming

    Big Day Coming (Second Version), by Yo La Tengo.

    Why yes, my favorite Yo La Tengo song is a really loud version of a really quiet song of theirs. Yo La Tengo is a band where I will buy anything, listen to anything, leave it on repeat for years, but I might never remember the name of an album or song except this one. I didn’t even realize there was a quiet version for a long time. This song became my anthem for starting/quitting jobs, moving, launching stuff, just generally useful for getting psyched up.

    That’s right, this is my walk-up music.

    //

    It’s day 100.

    I had planned to write a blog post and start sharing this project more widely, but events have overtaken me in the form of the unplanned home improvement project currently involving having moved everything out of the office and half the kitchen floor missing. Good times, but we’re making the best of it.

    I’ll write that blog post soon, honest. 😉

    One benefit of getting everything moved out of the office today? The microphone and MIDI keyboard were handy to make this sound a little less like a lo-fi bedroom cover and more like an over-engineered lo-fi bedroom cover.

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  • day 99: Never Say Goodbye

    Never Say Goodbye, by Bon Jovi.

    Fitting perhaps, that this song about not giving up on ideas that might not have been the best ideas, but were ideas nonetheless, graces us on day 99, recorded from a corner of the bedroom about 18 inches away from the dog, who fell asleep anyway, while the other two floors of the house are a little torn up with water damage repairs in progress.

    I knew I’d end up recording some of these in odd places, I just didn’t know it would be odd places inside my own home but here we are.

    Have I ever met a bad power ballad? I don’t know. There are so many good ones. There are also more Bon Jovi songs already on the list, but this one has been on the “maybe try this next time at karaoke” list in the Notes app on my phone. What, like you don’t have a karaoke list somewhere? You should. Dream big. Aim high. Fail spectacularly if you’re going to fail at karaoke.

    But honestly, anything from Slippery When Wet is going to be a winner.

    //

    Tuned down a half step last night for Poison as per the instructions, and didn’t realize until after I rehearsed this once and went to tune up. So I tuned all the way up, and it was easier to sing that way, too.

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  • day 98: Every Rose Has Its Thorn

    Every Rose Has Its Thorn, by Poison.

    This song might’ve been the first real guitar lesson I ever had. My aging British ex-pat metal-haired teacher wrote it out in my composition book as a very simple 1-4-5 progression in A, and taught me those three chords.

    Meanwhile, that was years after I had bought a copy of Look What The Cat Dragged In, and had honest questions about the hair and makeup choices involved.

    Today proved that I could balance…. a lot of things…. including dishwasher repair disasters, a flooded office, and still manage to get a song in the can.

    Oh, and recording straight into the laptop and I guess the “reduce ambient noise” feature in the OS is new? Or do I have Krispr turned on somewhere? Because we need as many overlapping ambient noise reduction layers as we can get these days, lest any of our business colleagues hear the real world bleeding in from the edges of the night.

    Anyway, I should’ve turned off the noise reduction thingie, but didn’t, so instead I “fixed” it in post, and while it’s not as bad as this morning when I “fixed” the dishwasher, it’s a bit of a hack.

    And I’m alright with that.

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