songs:365

  • day 297: Total Football

    Total Football, by Parquet Courts.

    This song takes a soccer tactical approach — Total Football — popularized by the Dutch in the 1970s, though it’s used elsewhere before and after — and applies it as a metaphor to the basic tenets of socialism, which, yes, I am the target market.

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    Maybe for the first time in this whole project, this is just the electric guitar, me and the microphone placed in a useful place for picking up my vocals, while the guitar is kinda impossible to miss. Seems appropriately lo-fi, and I’m glad I don’t have time today to try and drop a multi-track opus for this one.

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  • day 296: Country Heroes

    Country Heroes, by Hank Williams III.

    If you’re not familiar with the musical stylings of the grandson of Hank Williams, this song is a fine place to start, but it’s just a taste of the bitterness and celebration and light-heartedness, and heavy tones that await you. I highly recommend digging up one of the live shows on YouTube where it’s a sloppy, lovable mix of his band playing some of the classics note for note, some of Hank III’s hillbilly originals — and then late in the game sometimes Hank straps on an electric and things get downright punk.

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    Recorded completely sober but exhausted. 😉

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  • day 295: You Don’t Know How It Feels

    You Don’t Know How It Feels, by Tom Petty.

    Feeling angry tonight, but this song was the angriest thing I could rustle up on short notice. It’s late Tom Petty, definitely from a when-I-worked-at-record-stores teenage ’90s year of some sort, and I kinda remember the other single from this album better because of the video, but it fit for tonight.

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  • day 294: If It Be Your Will

    If It Be Your Will, by Leonard Cohen.

    Another one from the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack — I warned y’all it was formative — they don’t get through more than a verse of this song in the movie, and it stuck in my head so firmly that I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what it was, where to find it, which album it was on, etc., because although it’s in the movie, as noted by the Concrete Blonde version of Everybody Knows, the Leonard Cohen songs were not on the soundtrack that was released, I think? At least not the cassette I must’ve bought in 1992 or whatever. Reading up on it, Side B of Various Positions starts with Hallelujah and ends with this, and you can definitely hear some obvious bookending in the biblical-ish references.

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    Still have a cough, so I sought out something deep.

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  • day 293: Semi Suite

    Semi Suite, by Tom Waits.

    I usually call this song “Truck Drivin’ Man” in my head, and had to stop and think pretty hard when I saw “Semi Suite” on the track listing for this album, which I realize is one of several I have threatened to cover in its entirety. When one has a cold, might as well throw oneself at something gravelly.

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  • day 292: Hallelujah

    Hallelujah, by Jeff Buckley.

    This song was a Jeff Buckley song for me before it was a Leonard Cohen song, or a John Cale song, for that matter, but I love them all, so this is a cover of Jeff Buckley’s version, but thanks to my cold, the first verse and chorus is in Leonard mode.

    This is literally always in, like, the top 2 songs on the website I go to for guitar chords, and I have more questions than answers about that, but I know I’ve read before stories about all the versions of this thing, and how Shrek drove it into the stratosphere, and that movie’s alright, but I don’t want to give it too much credit. I am old enough to have heard the Jeff Buckley version when it was contemporary, and I was working in record stores the summer after freshman year of college, I guess?

    It’s Wonderwall-level played out, but I couldn’t play 365 songs and leave this one out.

    Kinda fun to read up on the places this guy played in New York that I would underage-drink in not too long after.

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  • day 291: Corrina, Corrina

    Corrina, Corrina, by Bob Dylan.

    Doing Bob Dylan songs with a cold is a little on the nose, but at least I managed to get into a weird open D (DADF#AD) tuning for this one to mess around with something new. This song doesn’t do much, but it does it real pretty.

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  • day 290: All Gone, All Gone

    All Gone, All Gone, by Palace Songs.

    Another one of my most precious bits of indie rock, a band and record that I only discovered via that Amy Sohn column in New York Press before other friendly indie rockers more twee than me validated my love for all things Palace, be they Songs or Brothers or Music.

    This song (Bandcamp link!) has some killer lines, and part of the chorus has the same chords as part of the chorus of the only “song” I ever really “wrote” as a teenage guitar student, which I just realized.

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    I’m a little under the weather, hence the Bill Callahan baritone for as long as I could stand it. Props to the phone microphone for not making it terrible.

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  • day 289: Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?

    Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?, by Peter Sarstedt.

    This song is on the Darjeeling Limited soundtrack. (Maybe it actually plays during the Hotel Chevalier short before it? I forget, but it’s the first song on the soundtrack to our favorite Wes Anderson movie, truly.) Last weekend when I was playing Half A World Away, my wife asked if I was playing this song; all she can really hear from upstairs is the rhythm of the chords, unless it’s something very very recognizable, so that tracks.

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    Had to add the little hook with the accordion or whatever, but of course with a weird synth instead, and it works pretty well!

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  • day 288: Minnie the Moocher

    Minnie the Moocher, by Cab Calloway.

    The first time I sang this song at karaoke was in Louisville at IRE NICAR, at a sort of “oh I guess we’re doing this” informal karaoke night, and there were… a number of people there? A good number. I don’t think I had ever sung the whole thing before, but I was most likely the only person in the room that once saw Cab Calloway sing this song live and in person which was a treat I probably appreciated for the singalongness of it.

    Also, the Blues Brothers.

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    A horn section! I made some minor efforts to break it up when it should be broken up with different parts.

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