songs:365

Tag: cover-of-a-cover

  • 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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  • day 27: Dolphins

    Dolphins by Cass McCombs (originally by Fred Neil)

    This is 100% a song I heard because Spotify put it on a playlist for me. It’s a cover by Cass McCombs, who has some records out, along with the Chapin Sisters.

    Apparently the original author, Fred Neil, was huge in the NYC folk scene in the ’60s, so much so that you’ve heard his song Everybody’s Talkin’ as made famous by Harry Nilsson in Midnight Cowboy, and I should add that one to the list, but also… ALSO… he got into dolphins, met Ric O’Barry, and worked for animal rights (well, dolphins, at least) for decades after.

    A little backup vocal and some sort of software electric piano on the choruses.

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  • day 21: Dead Flowers

    Dead Flowers by the Rolling Stones (and Townes van Zandt)

    We really love Big Lebowski around these parts. The Townes van Zandt version on the soundtrack was the only version of this song I knew for a good solid 20 years, until I found out it was a Rolling Stones song. Mick makes me laugh. Townes makes me cry.

    This one could use a second guitar and a little solo line and maybe even some backup singing on the chorus, but I need to sleep.

    It’s day 21, and that’s three weeks, and Dad taught me you have to do something for three weeks to make it a habit, so here we are with a habit.

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  • day 20: When I Paint My Masterpiece

    When I Paint My Masterpiece, by The Band

    Is it a Dylan song? Is it a Band song? Is it a Dylan and The Band song? I know it best as a song by The Band, so that’s what it is to me.

    I must’ve sung this to my infant children a thousand times or more when I was rocking them to sleep in my arms. If it had worked better, I joked that I could probably play it when they were teenagers and they’d pass out without knowing why.

    I love this little song. It felt like a great day for something raw, and triumphant, and appropriately enough getting the recording for the day done before the aforementioned children are asleep in their beds means I can let a little looser and get a little louder.

    I’d add an accordion if I could. If I had a harmonica in the right key… huh wait maybe I do. Next time?

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  • day 3: Frying Pan

    Frying Pan, by Victoria Williams (but I only know the Evan Dando cover)

    YO DAWG i heard you like covers of covers so i put a cover in your cover so you can cover while you cover.

    Right, so, day three, and it’s the third day of playing a song I know best as a cover. This is not the only song from the Sweet Relief tribute to / benefit for Victoria Williams (sister to Lucinda) that I have on the list. This is also another song I only ever heard in public at that first record store where I worked as a teenager. Formative years!

    I also have a funny Evan Dando story from just a couple years later when I was a freshman in college. The details are not for search engines, but the tl;dr is that we shut down a long gone East Village bar, singing along to Aretha Franklin on the jukebox, mostly.

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  • day 2: Blue Bayou

    Blue Bayou by Roy Orbison but really with Linda Rondstadt’s version in mind.

    Sometime in the past couple years, I heard an Esther Rose cover of Blue Bayou and tried it out. I probably heard Linda Rondstadt’s version first as a kid, because that’s just how Love 94, the local radio station ubiquitous in our house at the time, would have rolled.

    I added a second track of electric guitar to fill it out a little, because it’s the weekend and I had a minute. Oh, also, this must be pandemic self-haircut 5 or so.

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