songs:365

  • day 37: Holland 1945

    Holland 1945, by Neutral Milk Hotel.

    I guess it’s the weekend for non-ironically recording nineties classics that people joke about a lot on the internet?

    Not only did I miss Neutral Milk Hotel the first time around, even after I got into this album in my 40s, I didn’t pick up that it was about Anne Frank until I saw some amusing tweet about it.

    OK! This was the most actual fun this project has been in a few days I guess. The verdict is that I enjoy playing the electric guitar QUITE a bit. So there acoustic and electric rhythm tracks on this, plus what passes for lead guitar (absolute disaster in closing bars of that finale solo thing), and a kinda subtler than usual organ bass thing.

    Oh, and the requisite desperately autotuned backing vocal to cover up my singing a little bit.

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  • day 36: Wonderwall

    Wonderwall, by Oasis.

    Look, once you commit to playing 365 songs, the odds of Wonderwall being in there somewhere are pretty solid. I don’t have a whole lot of feelings about this one at all, it’s just fun, and the meme never gets old.

    In fact, if you hear me say the words “Anyway, here’s Wonderwall” at karaoke, the chances I am about to sing Wonderwall are approximately zero, and you’re more likely to be in for something by Bon Jovi.

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  • day 35: Hungry Heart

    Hungry Heart, by Bruce Springsteen.

    From around the same period as Being With You, and again, perhaps because I was living a capo-free life with my old Blueridge acoustic that had incredibly high action, I learned to play this with bar chords higher up the neck, but it’s nice this way, too.

    Whenever I sing the part about the bar in Kingstown, I am picturing a very specific place in Kingstown, New York. Or was it Saugerties? Or even Woodstock itself? Or is that a bar from a music video? My memory is a little fuzzy, but I can see the space, and the wood, and hear this song playing, and feel loss.

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  • day 34: Kiss Off

    Kiss Off by Violent Femmes.

    What’s your summer camp music? The music you heard for the first time on a scratchy cassette in a college dorm basement with cheap tile floor and worn out couches that served as dance hall, laundry room flirt space, and cloistered music space away from the noise and chaos of the main lobby with the TV?

    OK, so my summer camp experience may have been different from yours, but my early teenage years were filled with the imported angst of kids from the Carolinas — or maybe I was the import from Miami — and this song (and every other song on this album) was part of it.

    If you’re not counting along, are we even friends?

    A couple guitars and vocals, too loud and raw and sounding appropriately lo-fi, but not on purpose, but appropriate.

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  • day 33: Being With You

    Being With You by Smokey Robinson.

    It is a little irrational how much I sincerely love this song. I can not remember what inspired me to learn this one sometime in my last couple years in New York, but I did, and I annoyed my friends with it, and I made it my own. I guess some of us went through an Easy Listening phase, and I latched onto this gem from 1981. I do wish I had the chord changes I played back then written down, but the capo-oriented version here seemed like fun, too.

    There are, uh, multiple tracks on this one. Took some self-control to leave it at once backup vocal, because my lead vocal needs some help here. The opening imitation sax riff is more evidence that I am better at adding effects and layers than I am at mashing the keyboard at the right time. (This is not a metaphor.)

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  • day 32: Saw A Light

    Saw A Light by Bonny Doon.

    I don’t remember how this one found me, but I wanted to play it right away. I think I have that first take on my phone somewhere, but here’s a slightly evolved version with a few guitars and a couple voices and it’s not perfect but it’s better than yesterday’s song, so I’ll take it.

    Bonny Doon happens to be a place near Santa Cruz, and there was a vineyard and we must’ve sold the wine in one of the restaurants where I worked in those days before grad school.

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  • day 31: Overlord

    Overlord by Dirty Projectors.

    Welp, this went poorly. As you can see by the poorly synced vocals, I layered on several additional tracks of my flat singing, which is always a treat. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I like how the little intro came out, and I’m not even mad about the complete “forgot-to-hit-autoscroll-so-I-need-to-pause” dissolve edit.

    Someday soon on days like this when I have time to add this many bad ideas, I will have the good idea of starting with a beat and not the rhythm guitar / vocal combo which makes editing and mixing a little silly.

    The original song is lovely, as is the rest of this Dirty Projectors album/series thing.

    One month down.

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  • day 30: Do Re Mi

    Do Re Mi by Woody Guthrie.

    Believe it or not, this is another one I first heard on that Nanci Griffith cover album. It didn’t take that many years for me to hit a nice solid Woody Guthrie (ahem, Boodie Guppie, if you read that one book of Bob Dylan poetry) phase.

    This meant something specific during the years we lived in California, mostly as grad students and/or bartenders and/or early-career journalists and/or newlyweds and/or new parents.

    Raw and unedited, or mixed, as is obvious, and I flub the beginning and the ending terribly, but if this were perfect, we could afford to live in California. 😉

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  • day 29: Down There By The Train

    Down There By The Train by Johnny Cash (originally by Tom Waits)

    The American Recordings series of Johnny Cash albums were a favorite of mine toward the end of my years in New York, but this song ended up being the one I learned best back then. I was playing it a lot when I met my wife, and so it stuck with me.

    I didn’t read the liner notes closely enough in those days to figure out this was a Tom Waits song — I might’ve not known that until looking it up earlier this month to put on my list for this project. Tom’s original is just as sweet, even a little less dark. Oh, and there’s a bonus verse I’d never heard.

    One full take after a false start, just a little reverb and whatnot, and we’re done. The end of a long week.

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  • day 28: Everybody’s Talkin’

    Everybody’s Talkin’, by Harry Nilsson

    …but, as noted yesterday, originally by Fred Neil, who I had never heard of until recently.

    I know I heard this song as a kid on the radio long before ever coming within 30 yards of anything to do with Midnight Cowboy, but Midnight Cowboy was also an early feature of film school in New York, looking back just a few years in time to see the city seedier. If my freshman year of college was 25 years after that movie, then it’s now been more than 25 years since my freshman year.

    It’s not a song about New York, though, it’s a song about leaving New York. Rizzo on the bus to Miami, when I preferred traveling in the opposite direction. Until I left New York, too.

    Got this one done before dinner so I could stretch out my voice a little, but stick around through the first couple minutes to watch me not hit the high note at all and mess around a little. One take, though, with a little bit of extra guitar, vocals, and the requisite weird software keyboard basic bassline.

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