
I'll explain later.Covering a randomly selected song every day for a year, between my 39th and 40th birthdays. FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

So Cliff was over at the house to work with me on some demos for Skates & Rays, and The Machine had picked this Replacements song for me to do, and I roped him into contributing. Seemed a natural as he's one of the few people I know who agree with me that Don't Tell a Soul is a good album. As a sort of odd unplanned part of the process, all of the drum samples we ended up using were played by Derek, our drummer, so we had unwittingly created a Skates & Rays song. Ooops! But we've never done a thing where Cliff and I switch off vocals Waylon & Willie style, and it's me on the bass and Cliff on lead guitar, so that's new.
So for this one I did something that I might've been able to do on maybe one or two previous songs, but never have. I knew this song really well, so I decided not to bother to listen to it before working it out. I guessed at the key, choosing something that fit my range and thus was probably the original key since my singing was basically developed from Hitchcock anyhow, and I did look up the lyrics online, but I didn't consult a chord chart or anything. I went by memory... I didn't quite get the chord sequence right, but it worked for the melody line; I couldn't remember the bridge, either, and I think what I played is actually more like the bridge to "He's a Reptile", but then, what isn't?
I'm actually pretty ignorant of Bob Seger's music-- this song comes from a compilation in my parents' collection-- with the exception of "Old Time Rock & Roll" which I played a million times with Thunderhill. I'm not sure I'd really ever heard this song before. But I connected with it pretty quickly and without overthinking it, and that's often the best way. The vocal was a first take and one of my favorites that I've done so far.
It's Day 100 and Song 100 for 39-40. And I get to do The Fall again! The Unutterable is a great, great record, and not necessarily appreciated as such. It doesn't actually get dissed very much, but it comes from such a spotty period in Fall history-- the preceding Levitate is confused at best and the subsequent Are You Are Missing Winner is quite likely the gruppe's worst ever, brilliant title notwithstanding-- and it sounds so unusual for a Fall record that it is a little hard to process. But it is brilliant, totally brilliant, probably in my top 5 personal favorite Fall records.


This is kinda weird, because it's actually the second time I've sung these lyrics for 39-40. Way back when we did the Bjork cover with ten million vocals, the kids and I squirreled away some subliminal vocal tracks in foreign languages other than Icelandic... you almost certainly can't hear them, but somewhere on there Miranda's singing a blessing in Hebrew, Eden is reading a translation she'd just done for Latin, and I'm chanting the dada lyrics used in "I Zimbra".
Holy shit that was close. It's a tight squeeze to get the songs done during summer vacation when the kids are home all the time. There are certainly times when they are otherwise occupied and I can steal a moment or two to lay down tracks, but I tend to not want to record my amp most of the time... it just needs to be too loud to not interfere with any activity they might be working on. So my guitar tones for a while are going to be a lot more amp-simulatey than I would like... however, the tone I got today worked out pretty well, and fit with the hack and slash Andy Gill imitation I settled on for the tune. I forget sometimes that I can do that kind of stuff.
So the scheduling stuff does you in, especially during the summer. Right now I have two kids on summer vacation and one still in school for a week more. Balancing things out, I'd planned on taking the two vacationeers to Disneyland tomorrow, but at the last minute that got changed to today. How to bash out a Bow Wow Wow cover within that time frame? Well, I'll tell you.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think this is the first time I've done a second song from a single album, so I'm grateful that it's a great favorite of mine. If I were doing one of those increasingly popular cover-an-entire-album projects, I guess I'd be well on the way to having Dusted in the bag.
Second in the series of "quickies" done before turning the laptop in. In all honesty, the fasted way to get a cover accomplished is obviously as an acoustic strum and sing number, but it's not just playing and singing the thing straight through. That gets better results but typically takes at least five takes before I settle into the tune and play it all the way through without any major mistakes. It's much easier to play the guitar in one take, and then record the vocal in one take. It doesn't necessarily always sound inspired, but in a pinch it gets the job done.
My MacBook is approaching being three years old and Applecare is about to run out. In particular the battery's dead and it seemed prudent to take it in for one last workup. I had no way of knowing how long it would be away, so I set out to do some quick and dirty covers to tide 39-40 over in the interrim, so I wouldn't have to start from ground zero setting up my wife's machine for recording. This is the first one.
Okay, there are a few unfortunate whack circumstances affecting how this one turned out. The idea was that after a totally live, in-front-of-an-audience, have-to-dress-up-for-it kind of recording, I'd do one that was totally devoid of "real" elements except for my voice.
Yep, it's a real live track. I'm on the original, too, playing bass with my dad in the latter day Thunderhill, around 1990 at the Honi Honi in Deep Creek. I've played bass and sang harmonies on this song many, many times. So of course on my cover I had the ever-dependable Clifford Ulrich of Skates & Rays play the bass and sing the harmonies.
Listening to Green on Red always makes me happy. I couldn't describe myself as a rabid fan or anything-- I'm still only a few years into really getting them, and they have a lot of records to absorb-- but whenever I hear one of their records, it always seems just right. It's not fair that they get lumped in with all the Paisley Underground bands... they really have few if any true psychedelic leanings. But at the same time, for all their rootsiness, they're never stridently earnest about it. At all. Which makes them all that much more authentic in a way. Maybe it's really just that the Paisley Underground scene shouldn't have been pegged, in name or thought, so directly to '60s revivalism; it was much richer than that. I've been exploring it in some depth for the past few years and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface.
After a day like yesterday when your best efforts still don't git it, you tend to feel obliged to get one really right. I think I did so on this one, with Eden's help. It was a natural to have her sing it-- it's a song like one she would write or even cover in her band Wye. It was mostly a matter of putting in the work. It turned out way way janglier than the original for a couple of reasons, one being my use of the 12-string and my sudden accidental discovery of a trick to make it sound really really good, and another being the way Eden opted to change the wall-of-sound rhythm guitar into a much choppier John Lennon kind of thing.
If nothing else, my record collection is, for the most part, acquitting itself fairly well in term of what The Machine has selected for me. There are many bands whose records might equally well be found in good and bad music libraries; Mission of Burma is not such a band.
The last time The Machine selected a Christmas tune for me, I recoiled from its unseasonal holiday cheer and insisted on remaking it completely. But I've matured since then. "Matured" is a word that means you tried something and it turned out to be hard and you don't want to do it again.
Time is of the damn essence in these things. Eden was supposed to sing on this one, too, but she was out at a play with a friend and didn't get home until her bedtime. We've rushed things through in the past, but it just wasn't happening this time. Consequently there's a lot more of my voice on this one than I would have liked.
Recorded this after the longest (albeit invisible to readers because I'd gotten well ahead of myself) break between sessions since beginning 39-40. Just hit a bit of a wall.


Looking over the lyrics to this tune as she was about to sing it, Eden asked, "Wow, was he really depressed when he wrote this?" She hadn't connected it with the whole James Bond theme thing, which offered a fresh perspective on what is a pretty fatalistic piece just standing on its own. What I did to it musically is pretty much just demented. It seems like 39-40 is just going through a bit of a phase like that.
Sadly, Mr. Marsalis can have had absolutely no idea how accurately titled this piece would be by the time I was done with it. I had to enlist my robot girl Anjali to help explain this one, and even she ended up with an ambiguously pitch-shifted voice due to some kind of odd transfer error. You can hear me doing just a little bit of improvisational soloing on the one instrument on which I can meaningfully do that sort of thing, but, once again, when the lion's share of the piece's soul lies in its liveness, the interation between the musicians, I may have to resort to novelty to make anything out of it if it's just me in a room with some instruments and microphones.
So this project has reached a point where I'm starting to take stock of how many of my initial ideas I've used and whether the remaining ones are any good. One of the questionable ones was to transform a song or two into "dramatic readings" or even something akin to a radio play, with characters and sound effects and so forth... maybe that'll happen eventually, althoug it sounds like quite a task. But the spoken word thing seemed pretty do-able, except for the part where I'm sick of my own voice again, so I solicited recordings over Facebook. The voice you hear on this track is that of Ross Overbury, who in the course of volunteering reminded me that he's been soliciting performances of monk vocals for nearly a month, which did make me rightly feel like a bit of a self-centered nimrod and get just such a recording to him. This is the part where the internet is kind of fun.