Here is a measure of to what extent I will hold on to all music which crosses my path, "just in case". Will and the Bushmen was a college rock band who played a free show or similar at school during my freshman year of (well, yeah) college. I didn't see them, but a number of my friends did, and one of them passed me along the cassingle (I think; it might have been a 1 track CD) of the song "Book of Love" from this album. I notoriously never sold back CDs during the whole time I collected physical media, holding onto even records on which I only liked one song, albums which didn't rock my world at the time but I thought might reveal themselves to me later, and completely incidental freebies like this one. Sort of-- by the time I sold all of my CDs a few years ago after ripping them all to mp3s, I had upgraded the single for a copy of the full-length spotted in a 99-cent bin.
I almost did something "cute" with this song... something cute which would have involved barely "covering" it. But as I started to play around with the song I hit upon a few voicings and a feel that reminded me of something completely unrelated, and I went that route. More importantly, I used the two-mic acoustic setup I test-drove a few weeks back, but with the near-noiseless MOTU instead of my old hissy mixer, and I was able to get a sound that I really liked. I matched a vocal approach to it that made the whole thing a study in quiet. And for what I think is the first time on 39-40, excluding the illness-fueled Mac-mic period, I didn't add any kind of treatment to any of the basic tracks... no reverb, no EQ, nothing. That felt good.
There was one lyric I wasn't totally confident I'd understood, so I sang "Box O' Laffs" as a little nod to the band that became Camper Van Beethoven.
Personnel: Rex
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