You Are A Light, by Pavement.
Whoopsie, this is awful.
Whoopsie, I did Malkmus two days in a row.
Whoopsie, I had a much easier (but louder) song halfway done, but the dog flipped out.
Whoopsie, despite several runs at this song during the year, I was wholly unprepared to record this at 9:30pm in DADF#BE tuning on the acoustic, but, hey, full send.
//
Big shoutout to the person who transcribed all the Pavement and Malkmus songs through like 2015 or so in the right tunings.
Type Slowly, by Pavement.
I was in the mood for a weird tuning, and this song in DADF#AD fit the bill. The thing about Pavement songs is that so many of Malkmus’s lyrics are absolute nonsense, even if they’re fun. i.e. “and one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine” or whatever. It’s just fun to belt out.
I have no idea what’s going on in the solo-ish pieces, because I obviously did not attempt anything as ambitious as a second guitar.
Starlings in the Slipstream, by Pavement.
OK, once you’re tuned down half a step, you might as well commit to weird tunings for another day, check the Pavement tuning list, switch into DADABE, and take on this song, second to last on Brighten the Corners.
I swear, I thought the whole “no coast of Nebraska” thing went on much longer, and that maybe it was “no Pope of Nebraska” but who am I to say. Also, the “hard, hard Cs” was “high, high Cs” in my memory for a long time.
Piled in a little too much and it’s silly, but there we are.
Silence Kid, by Pavement.
Saturday afternoon project…
Back around 2014 when I bought myself an electric guitar for the first time in a decade or two, I always almost entirely driven by trying to get some approximation of Pavement’s sound. The (Squire) Jazzmaster, the Orange amp, a pedal or two, all helped, but the real leap of progress came when I found someone had bothered to transcribe all their songs (and lots of the available Malkmus solo stuff at the time) with all the correct tunings and tablature. Slay Tracks person, if you’re out there somewhere, thank you, and please do the past five years of Malkmus records, too. And thank you.
I wasn’t really sure how to get a decent video without lip syncing, and I didn’t want to do that for this project if I can help it, so all you get is video of me vibing to the first 70 seconds or whatever before the vocal comes in, and then it’s full on lounge singer moves with the mic in my hand.
There are three different guitar tracks and three vocals and some software stuff. The drums are silly, but when they work, it’s really helpful. There are also some terrible edits, because the electric guitar part is a lot to get right.
This song is called Silence Kid, no matter what it says on the back of the record, and the original slaps.
Harness Your Hopes, by Pavement.
This odd b-side became one of Pavement’s most popular songs on Spotify for very strictly algorithmic reasons and that makes it extra fascinating to me.
Nowhere close to my favorite Pavement song, and has little meaning to me personally, since I heard it for the first time in the past couple years as Spotify started carrying all these deep cut rerelease remaster whatever thingies of all the Pavement albums, which I have on vinyl, thank you very much, but was already late to when a certain art student a year older than me played Crooked Rain in her dorm room and I developed a crush but she was gay and I was thoroughly clueless.
The vinyl all got taped to cassette and even later stuff like their last album together was walkman fodder for my walking-and-commuting-a-lot-in-New-York-City years.
Added an electric track and kinda sorta tried to play the solo at the end, which is cute. If it sounds like anything it’s thanks to the Fuzz Factory pedal I have specifically so I can sound a little like Stephen Malkmus. (The guitar and amp were also selected to serve that purpose but we’ll get to them later.)