Honestly, I have no idea when I got so into this song, and this album, but it was neither the first ten times someone played it for me, nor was it the result of the present day quiz show radio co-host scenario. [EDIT: Jonathan Coulton is a completely different person, dummy.] So, somewhere in between.
The bits about Massachusetts always remind me of my friends from Boston, but also of a gig in Providence on a student film where we stayed across the border in Seekonk, Mass. and had to carefully time our liquor purchases. We were driving cube trucks on the dark highway late at night, not for the first or last time.
Friday night fun with a drum loop and keyboards and a couple backup Modern Lovers.
In my teenage years, before I listened to Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline, or that one time in college I had been up all night before a holiday break and heard Beethoven’s Ninth in a warm car service Lincoln on the way to Newark to fly home, I would say things like “I like every kind of music except classical and country” and that was pretty dumb, right there on the face of it.
I probably thought Garth Brooks was a fascist back then (he wasn’t!).
The first time I heard people sing along with this song* and mean it, I was in Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, and the people were sloppy, and they meant it.
The next time (?) I sang it with people and meant it, I was in a hotel conference room in Rotterdam in the middle of the night, and there’s video I won’t share here, but it was perfect.
Played the guitar with the wrist brace on, and did it earlier in the day so I’m not as tired as promised, but I am typing this at the end of a long one.
Kept it kinda simple, recorded the video first so I could mess up that pre-chorus a little bit and not need more than one take.
The black hat was required for this one, obvs.
*Every other link to a song in this project so far is to Spotify, but Garth doesn’t stream much by design, so this one is to Amazon. Also, I probably haven’t heard the original of this more than a couple times, including that day (day? night? New Year’s Eve?) in Key West. Also, I should’ve done the cheesy guitar solo.
If you think I look tired in this one, wait until tomorrow night.
This evening I read the instructions for the wrist brace. They start with the words “FOR LEFT HAND USE” and reader, I gasped, because I did not know the splint belonged on the palm side, and I’ve been wearing this thing so wrong it was causing me pain, though certainly stabilizing my wrist well enough.
Might as well work on the acapella-adjacent harmony things if I can’t use two-handed instruments, right?
I tried a whole “sing along to a chord so you actually stay in the same key this time” approach, and it went okay. Then I transposed it up a fifth and sang along to that, too. Then I dumped all the Casio backing tracks and just left the simple drum loop and three vocal tracks. It’s only as terrible as my singing.
This song should never have been in a Mercedes commercial.
Me: Hmm, I’ll hold on to this acapella song on my list for a day when I need something quiet.
The universe: Cool, you can slip on the ice today and maybe break a wrist.
Can’t play guitar today and I really need to sleep, and I still don’t really know how to sing harmonies, but my wife gave me a clue about singing the thirds or fifths in between the third and fourth tracks of vocals here, and I figured out that I can sing along to a sort of organ drone track in the right key and then delete the track, which is mind-opening for sure, but also had already recorded it in a wavering key that completely changes a couple verses in (not intentional), so this is what you get.
I warned you there would be more from O Brother Where Are Thou, and this song has an intriguing little history, but a lot of Southern-ish Spirituals-ish songs do.
The fact that I don’t understand what “only ’90s kids will get this” means surely indicates I am not a ’90s kid. I was certainly a ’90s teenager, though. I came to Jane’s Addiction late, but not by much. Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual loomed large in the latter stages of high school, as they did for lots of ’90s teens, I suppose.
Perry Farrell went to my high school, and if you were an enterprising Drama Club kid who knew how to climb up into the sort of untended catwalk above the stage in the classroom, you could see where he had signed his name, and you could sign yours.
This song probably means something to a ’90s teen you know.
Another weekend project, wherein the first appropriate drum loop I found is… uh… well trap house seems kinda appropriate for this artist, so let’s not ask too many questions about my decision making on this one. I am really thinking it’s time to stop playing the rhythm guitar while I sing, because there’s way too much of it.
This song was my 2020 Jam of the Year™, and you should listen to it. You should listen to the whole Waxahatchee record, and then you should go back and listen to her duet with Kevin Morby on a cover of Farewell Transmission, and then you should go listen to that quiet piano EP thing that I listened to on repeat in a hotel room in Mexico City (?!) in 2019 while quietly getting some work done in between the work. There’s even a Song Exploder about this track, which feels like cheating, but it’s been months since I heard it, and I’m no Katie Crutchfield.
Had to bump this one up a full step, because I am no Katie Crutchfield. This is the first time I have successfully looped a beat from the Garageband library, used the MIDI keyboard to lay down some other software instruments, looped those, too, and then played and sang along in time like a proper recording.
Big Rock Candy Mountain, by Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock.
O Brother Where Art Thou might not be in my top three Coen Brothers movies, but it’s probably a top three soundtrack for me, all time. This song is a hobo’s fantasy that dates back to at least the 19th century.
I first started toying around with this song and its cute little riff in 2001 on the job in New Mexico where I met my wife. Somehow there was a lot of guitar-and-singalong time for a film shoot.
The rest of the soundtrack is lovely, and I might threaten to record another one. The rest of Haywire Mac’s catalog is great, too.
What more can be said about national treasure, hero, and icon Dolly Parton? Today she turned down a statue.
She wrote a statement using these words:
“I don’t think putting me on a pedestal is appropriate at this time.”
She is the walking, talking, lifesaving discourse.
I got into this song sometime before a work conference in Chicago in 2014, where I had somehow committed to sing it as a fundraiser at karaoke.
As often happened at fall conferences when my kids were small, I had a cold, it went poorly, and I had lots of fun.
These days, everyone loves Jolene, and everyone loves Dolly, and it’s OK to love things.
Kept it simple tonight because throwing a capo on four frets up makes everything I can do with my fingers sound pretty decent, and it’s in a key I can handle… maybe except for the last Jolene in the chorus, but it went alright.
This song is another one I associate with the first record store I worked at as a teenager. We definitely played In Utero too loud before opening and after closing for a while there. Picking the music to play in store was seriously a highlight of the shift, and oh, golly gee, we have to promote the new Nirvana CD, don’t we? Yeah, we played it pretty loud.
The Unplugged version of this is probably the canonical one in my head — that is the best Unplugged, right? I am eyeing the Meat Puppets songs from that album with hungry eyes. (Wait, should I play Hungry Eyes?)
Until today I was pretty sure Kurt sang “choking on the ashes of a runaway” which is pretty gross, but apparently it was always “of her enemies” which seems much more sensible.
No MIDI keyboard or software instruments at all on this one, but properly recording the riff on the electric and looping it in a way that works for like 85% of the song feels like a strong achievement for this one.
