You're requesting a song for me to cover. Truth is you're nominating a song, and the winning song will be chosen randomly from every song nominated for that day. That will be the one I record and post the next day.
What you do is this:
-When I post a blog entry saying "Taking Requests for MM/DD/YYYY", post a COMMENT containing the name of the song *and the original artist* that you want me to cover.
-When I've posted the current day's song, I'll post a comment saying "Request line closed." Most days I'll post an entry declaring the request line for the next day open at the same time. Repeat.
That's it.
Some days, for various reasons, I may not take requests. If that happens, I'll post an entry saying so and you'll know. I'll try to cross-post the announcements of open request lines to FaceBook; we'll see how long I can keep that up.
Here are the ground rules.
1) Please request only ONE SONG per day. (That's so you don't just nominate every single King Crimson song, making it a statistical inevitability that I'll have to do one of them.)
2) Don't nominate a song someone else has already nominated for that day. It's not a democratic voting process; no matter how many people request the song, it'll only count as *one* song among the titles nominated that day.
3) Please specify the original artist! There are a lot of songs that share the same title, and sometimes I'm more familiar with the less-known one. And while I may seem to know a lot about music, there are vast and maybe surprising gaps in my knowledge... for example, I don't know that much about Top 40 songs from when I was kid and was supposed to be listening to Top 40. I don't say that to sound cool (dear God, was I not); it's just the way it shook down.
4) I need to be able to hear the original. I have a lot-- and I mean a damn LOT-- of songs in my iTunes library, but I don't have every song ever recorded. So if you're requesting something you think I might not have, it would help if you link to a copy of the original. But you can use some common sense here. If you're requesting "The Joker" or some damn Smashing Pumpkins crap, you can bet I don't have the original in my library, but you can also safely assume that I can lay hands on it without much effort. If you're requesting the b-side to the rare first single by some third tier C86 band or a deep album cut by Jandek, I might need some reference.
5) You gotta be in it to win it. No standing requests. If you want to request the same song every day until I do it, cool, but make sure to put in a new request each day.
6) Don't expect me to follow your suggestions about *how* I cover it. I can make my own choices between banjos, sequencers and smoldering amplifiers.
7) What about gaming the system, you ask? Go for it! There are probably all kinds of ways to mess this whole thing up with sock puppets, repeated requests, spamming, ganging up on me, or whatever. It's my job to deal with it, so I will. Go ahead and be a total dick if you want to-- I don't care! I sort of anticipate that this'll go through a few phases... stump the guitarist, funny lyrics to hear Rex singing, dedications, songs tied to current events, stump the guitarist again, and so on. At least I hope that kind of rolling conversation will become the background for 39-40 Part II.
Thanks for participating... this should be fun for both of us.
