songs:365

Tag: cover-of-a-cover

  • day 365: El Año Viejo

    El Año Viejo, by Tony Camargo.

    Well, this is it. Day 365. I will not be recording a song tomorrow.

    I have lots of things to say about this project, and the journey I’ve been on this year exploring these songs, my memories of them, the data about them, and maybe remixing or rerecording some for sure, but for now, I am excited to be done.

    This song is one of two time-honored traditional New Year’s Eve songs I learned from my wife’s family. (The other song is Cinco Pa’ Las Doce.) This one is not Venezuelan — the original songwriter and singer is Colombian; Tony Camargo, who recorded the most popular version (and the one I’m familiar with) is from Mexico — but it seems to be popular everywhere.

    The words to the song — and there are not that many, come down to this:

    I won’t forget the old year, because it brought me very good things: a goat, a black donkey, a white mare, and a good mother-in-law.

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  • day 352: But Not For Me

    But Not For Me, by Chet Baker.

    This song originates in a musical with Ginger Rogers singing it, if I understand correctly, though the lineage of some “standards” tends to run back to lines like “well, actually, it was used in six musicals no one ever saw before GInger Rogers made it famous,” but none of that really matters — OK, the Billie Holliday version certainly matters, and the Ella Fitzgerald version is well known — but otherwise, none of that really matters to me except the version of this song on Chet Baker Sings, a CD which I played to death, and/or which was killed in the great freshman-year-of-college-is-over-time-to-UPS-the-CD-collection-home-poorly which was several bad decisions layered on top of each other.

    As I understand it, bad decisions were a speciality of Chet Baker’s, and he is not alone in that respect.

    //

    This is one of a few jazz numbers I had penciled into the list. I’ve worked on John Coltrane’s Naima on and off for a couple decades, but idk if I will pull it off in the next 13 days. I have a Nature Boy on the list, mostly because I want to sing it. We’ll see.

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  • day 344: In My Time Of Dyin’

    In My Time Of Dyin’, by Bob Dylan.

    This song was super fun to play, another one of these Dylan blues translations in an open tuning, with a capo, and an optional slide (rehearsed with it a little but didn’t use it when I recorded.)

    So it’s a traditional, maybe attributable to Blind Willie Johnson, but if you don’t know the Dylan version, you might know the Zeppelin version, and just mayyyyyyybe you know it from its appearance/interpolation in one of the Spacemen 3 songs I did earlier in this project.

    //

    Did I have to open the door to try and let the barking dog know where I was, and that I was the source of the offensive noise she was barking at? Yes. Yes, I did.

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  • day 310: Sweet Jane

    Sweet Jane, by the Cowboy Junkies.

    [record scratch, freeze frame]

    Yup, that’s me, recording another #cover-of-a-cover to keep things femme in November. Not sure how many more I can do in a row, but this song is one I’ll take in any of its many forms. The Cowboy Junkies version was one I heard around the first record store I worked at, and looking it up just now, it’s obviously because it was on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. (Apologies to everyone who had forgotten about that movie. I had, too!)

    There was also some sort of live Velvet Underground reunion record in the 90s, I think? I think they did more of what the Cowboy Junkies cover here when they played it live, I guess. Even if you don’t get to say the hokey “and some people like us go to a Velvet Underground concert” line doing this version, it has some super nice parts. (That I messed up, but still.)

    This might be a nice one to take another run at with the electric and the proper amount of reverb.

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  • day 302: Dreadful Wind and Rain

    Dreadful Wind and Rain, by Jerry Garcia & David Grisman.

    This song of course was gifted to me on one Garcia/Grisman record or another by my Deadhead-adjacent college roommate, though I think this burnt CD crossed hands years later. What’s better than a creepy murder ballad on a cold and windy rainy day? Lots of things. Lots of things are better, but this mission this weekend is spoopy songs. So this is what you get.

    It is predictably a #cover-of-a-cover, though really, more of a traditional with foggy origins.

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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 277: New Minglewood Blues

    New Minglewood Blues, by the Grateful Dead.

    Back in 2004 and 2005, apparently, when we drove a manual Honda Civic with no A/C, but a 6-disc changer in the trunk, I made some mix CDs for road trips. These things live on in the big ol’ CD wallet I still drive around with, and lately “Driving Music 04” and “Camping Mix, vol. 2” have been in rotation. The 11-year-old has identified “Driving Music” as a favorite, for some unknown reason, even taking precedence over our “Soccer Practice” Spotify playlist that includes Herbie Hancock and Fela Kuti, but OK.

    Somewhere in the middle of the CD, this song kicks in, and quickly provides somewhat nonsensical blues lyrics, if you’re an 11yo who is in a mode lately to just absolutely question everything if it’s not perfectly rationale, which is not at all exhausting.

    How can he be raised in a lion’s den?? This song doesn’t make any sense.

    My younger spawn.

    It’s great. Today when I skipped it, because he’s annoying, he insisted that we listen to it, but that I wasn’t supposed to sing along. Reader, I sang along.

    I’m not sure which version is on the CD, of course, but I was a big fan of May ’77, and there’s one of those on Spotify, so that’s where I’m linking to above.

    Oh, and of course, this is a #cover-of-a-cover, as the original is by someone called Noah Lewis.

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  • day 265: Romeo and Juliet

    Romeo and Juliet, by Indigo Girls.

    This song was an Indigo Girls song for me long, long before I found out it was a Dire Straits song, and I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to the original on purpose, so this is just what it is.

    //

    I never feel like I’m straining when I’m rehearsing. Is it because I sing louder when I record? I dunno. 265 songs in, 100 to go, and I should probably, like, be improving my singing along the way here, like maybe watch a YouTube video about how to sing or something?

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  • day 242: Midnight Special

    Midnight Special, by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

    OK, so when I hear this song in my head, sometimes it’s Leadbelly’s original, of course — yes, this is a #cover-of-a-cover — but also, mostly, I hear the guys in the semi cab in Creepshow singing along with Creedence. Wait, was it Creepshow? Or Twilight Zone (The Movie)? Oh, wow, it’s Twilight Zone. And it’s Albert Brooks. And Dan Aykroyd. And it’s the opening scene. And while it is indeed “something really scary” it’s somehow mashed up deeply in my head with “Tell ’em Large Marge sent ya” but also watching that one again, it’s kinda cute? Ah, memories. They’re not complicated at all.

    So I guess this is at least the second Leadbelly cover I’ve covered, and I might need to play more Creedence, because, y’know.

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  • day 234: This Magic Moment

    This Magic Moment, by Jay and the Americans.

    See, the thing is, I’ve done a ton of Love 94™ songs, but little from the heavy rotation of Magic 102.7, Your Good Time Oldies Station™, which my parents mostly switched over to at some undetermined moment in the mid-1980s, and my Oldies exposure ratcheted way up from the basics — The Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens — I did have the whole La Bamba movie soundtrack pretty much memorized — to the overplayed-but-classic classics by the Frankies and Smokies and Coasters and Flamingos and, sure, Jay and the Americans, why not? (“Come a little bit closer” is a dated-but-effective story!)

    Oh, wait, the Drifters did this first? Crap, which version am I playing? I definitely heard them both, but let’s stick with JatA and call this a #cover-of-a-cover I guess.

    This song uses the chord changes you would expect from a song that is indeed originally from the 1950s: C-Am-F-G, and it popped into my head unbidden after I gave Earth Angel a try because, yes, of course, it’s the same chords.

    This was the first song recorded with my new office manager resting (lightly snoring, perhaps) in the background.

    Welcome Zuko

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