124. "Atchafalaya Pipeline" by BeauSoleil

This one turned out completely wrong, but in as good a way as possible. The concept of the original tune is the "Cajunization" of a surf song, which is cute, but I don't have the instruments or chops to really produce anything vaguely Cajun sounding. I do have the stuff to produce a low-rent surf track, but I was again stuck with the problem of how irritating listening to 3 minutes of my own playing can be to me. So I tried to enlist someone else to play at least some of the solos, and got no response at all. I also considered doing all of the solos on oddball instruments I can barely play for a really weird sound, and even just dropping a message into the tune saying, "Okay, play your own solo here" or something.

But when I got to setting up the basic track, something clicked. Specifically, it was the process of recording the Fender Twin, which was basically born to do this kind of thing, and then tweaking it for two different sounds. While testing out the "lead" sound I ended up with an actual "riff" that sounded pretty good for a surf tune, and I just rolled with that idea. What I got in the end may not be a completely stellar example of the genre, but nobody's going to mistake if for anything else, so in that sense, mission accomplished. Especially given my lack of tremolo bars and single-coil-up guitars!

Personnel: Rex

"Atchafalaya Pipeline" performed by Beausoleil

"Atchafalaya Pipeline" performed by Rex Broome

123. "Mama Lion" by Crosby & Nash

I know David Crosby is kind of a punchline and a punching bag for a lot of people, but I can't help but like the guy. First of all, if you're going to tell me he's not talented, I'll fight you. He's the most inventive rock rhythm guitarist I can think of (and if you thing that's damning with slight praise, you haven't listened to his guitar work on the Byrds records as closely as I have). And it may be true that the harmony work of CSNY is often overrated, but Crosby's part in it, and certainly that of the Byrds, sure as hell isn't. His songs are baffling... the distance between "Everybody's Been Burned" and "Mind Gardens", written around the same time, is almost precisely the distance between the sublime and the ridiculous. He has a weight problem, and a drug problem, and basically rather a lot of problems, but writing him off as a dated hippie joke is just not right.

Graham Nash seems a nice enough fellow with a pretty voice who deserves your sympathy just for how much shit he's taken from Stephen Stills over the years, and what's not to adore about the early Hollies records?

Spoilers: This is probably the first recording I've ever created which switches time signatures, at least in any kind of planned or organized fashion.

Personnel: Rex

"Mama Lion" performed by Crosby & Nash

"Mama Lion" performed by Rex Broome

122. "The Daily Planet" by Love

And then some days I get to do a song that I totally love and would've like to learn eventually anyway.

Odd side effect, though. I've always thought of Forever Changes and Ocean Rain as total twin albums, and this song and "Silver" as particularly joined at the hip. I've gotten into a bad habit of quoting other songs in the course of my 39-40 covers, or at least of overdoing it, but since the direct link between these songs has long since existed in my mind, I decided to be deliberate about it this time. And it was thus that I discovered that some awful accident has caused all of my Echo & the Bunnymen records to disappear from my hard drive. And that's a big deal, because I had *all* of them... the box set, the reunion records, the weird but good album without McCulloch... quite a crisis here, and the big downside of having your music in digital-only form. I back my library up frequently, but in this case there must have been some unnoticed accidental dragging and dropping of a single folder that just happened to contain one of my favorite bands' entire output. About this I am not at all pleased.

Othewise, this one was a blast to do.

Personnel: Rex

"The Daily Planet" performed by Love

"The Daily Planet" performed by Rex Broome

121. "Standing Around Crying" by Muddy Waters

One of the challenges of 39-40 at almost four months deep is to produce the occasional track that actually sounds a little bit different. In theory this shouldn't be too hard... one should have plenty of time to think up ideas like "I'll play this whole song on a rake" or "How about recording it and then rerecording it playing on the computer from 20 feet away" or whatever. The reality is that when you have so much stuff set up and so little time to work, and a chunk of your time is spent just plain learning the song, you really tend to use the same guitars and basic setups fairly frequently. Well, I do. Maybe someone else would do it better, and if so, they should please demonstrate it, because I don't see anyone else doing this shit.

Anyway, a long time ago Gen bought an old Kay guitar and its matching original amp, a thing that looks sort of like a sewing machine and features among other distinctions a combination on/off/tone knob. The guitar has basically become Eden's and she generally plays it through the Vox amps her patrons at the Burbank Music Academy provide. But I always felt like that guitar/amp combo might make for a nice dirty blues kind of sound if recorded right. Eden's at her dad's house with the guitar today, but the amp's still here, and I decided to put my idea to the test with this Muddy Waters tune, substituting my Tele Deluxe for the original guitar. I also came sort of close to my original idea, which had to do with how totally apocalyptic certain passage of these really slow early electric blues tunes can sound, easily the equal of the more harrowing passages or Confusion is Sex; I wanted to slow a drum loop down to the point where it was all skronky and digital-artifacty all over the place to mirror that in a way. It didn't quit read as I wanted it to, but it's not too bad.

Personnel: Rex

"Standing Around Crying" performed by Muddy Waters

"Standing Around Crying" performed by Rex Broome

120. "A Magazine Called Sunset" by Wilco

In the end Wilco kind of pisses me off. And I loved them, truly I did. In the fallowest period of the '90s and on a whim I picked up a rilly cheap used copy of Being There and was pretty well floored by it. It was rock and roll, and it was good, and it had that good rock and roll feeling I hadn't felt since, let's say, the heyday of the Replacements. The band and its lineage-- I had missed Uncle Tupelo the first time around-- stood me in good stead for quite some time, as lineups changed and critical darlinghood peaked, culminating in what I thought was a fascinatingly rough-hewn semi-masterpiece in A Ghost Is Born. Some very intriguing krautrock influences were peaking through, and there were Television- and Crazy Horse-inspired passages that seemed inspired, and the lyrics were going places. They added Nels Cline, one of my favorite oddball guitarists, for the tour and then as a permanent member, so I'd hoped for more out-there adventures on the first record featuring him as a full member...

... but Sky Blue Sky was an abomination to my ears. Bland, inert, uninspired and uninspiring; comparisons to '70s soft rock did a serious disservice to Glenn Campnbell and America, and the faux-soul numbers were just about unlistenable. On the online mailing list I've tended to call home for many, many years, both of the other major Wilco fans agreed with me completely, and I felt sure this was a quantifiable bomb. But to my amazement, people liked it. It ended up on tons of end-of-the-year Top 10 lists and to this day I see it cited as a career highlight. And this is unusual for me. It's a rare work that's widely appreciated in which I can find no value whatsoever even if I don't like it, particularly by one of my favorite artist, but here it was. I slogged my way through the whole records another few times after the praise started pouring in, but somewhere in the first ten minutes I could still feel rigor mortis setting in. There was no hope. And then within a year or so, one of the two ex-fans to whom I alluded above suddenly and tragically passed away, at last notice still as disdainful of Nu-Wilco as ever, and that to me sealed it. If she wasn't going to get to hear anything else by the band that might restore her faith, why should I?

Anyway, this one's for Natalie Jane.

Personnel: Rex

"A Magazine Called Sunset" performed by Wilco

"A Magazine Called Sunset" performed by Rex Broome

119. "Music for Evenings" by Young Marble Giants

I finally heard Young Marble Giants maybe three years ago, after frequently stumbling across them being cited as an influential and seminal group and almost always misunderstanding what that influence actually was. I initially got the impression they were somehow proto-grunge, and then that they were trip-hop precursors, and exactly neither of those ideas were even close to the mark. Nothing prepared me for the bewitching sparseness of the actual YMG; they really don't sound like anything else, and that almost restores, to the extent that it ever existed, my faith in the gatekeepers of musical hipsterism... it's amazing that this music was ever recognized as being quite as great as it is, and that its reputation has persevered, however warped the associations might have become.

I'd guess that the obvious approach to covering almost YMG song is to make it "bigger", since the original recordings suggest sketches to begin with. I don't think they're sketches at all... I think they'd pretty much fully arrived as they are. Nonetheless, my cover got bigger. I tried not to make it bigger in a stupid way, though. Well, stupidity does leak through in one area, but I'll leave that for you to discover on your own.

Personnel: Rex

"Music for Evenings" performed by Young Marble Giants

"Music for Evenings" performed by Rex Broome

118. "It's Got To Be Done" by Lonesome Valley Singers

This one' from The Happy Listener's Guide to Mind Control, a compilation of bizarre propaganda, agitprop and subliminal-message-like stuff that's entertainingly alarming to listen to in an "it couldn't happen here... again... could it?" way.

The original thought here was that it might be even more disturbing to have kids singing this song, but then, in the name of summer activities, I started to think it would be cool to have the girls really play all the instruments, and by the time we were done with that, I'd changed my mind and decided we needed a more relevant nemesis than the "commies". The girls and I agreed, as would everyone, I think, that the true enemies are "the stupids", so we constructed the song as a counter-revolutionary volley in the War Against Intelligence.

Personnel: Braine!

Eden Hain ~ guitar and vocals

Miranda Broome ~ bass and vocals

Ridley Broome ~ keyboards and vocals

Rex Broome ~ other stuff (not much)

"It's Got To Be Done" performed by Lonesome Valley Singers

"It's Got To Be Done" performed by Braine

117. "Ici Les Enfants" by The Monochrome Set

I'd always assumed that when I finally hit a song that I "couldn't do" for 39-40, it would be because of some really difficult structural or musical issue. But that wasn't the case. When The Machine dropped this one in my lap, I knew right away I was going to have trouble performing it because of the lyrical content. It concerns a-- if not the specific-- Roman Polanski-esque case of child fixation and probable molestation, referring specifically to the age of the victim as 12, which is the age of one of my daughters. Now, it's not a bad song or anything... it's a critical indictment, in fact, just one that takes the often effective first-person perspective of the offender, like the murder ballads of old, country prison tunes, most of the songs on Peter Gabriel's melting face record, and countless other compositions. It's just that I can't imagine myself singing these particular words.

So last night I put some thought into how I was going to approach this. I thought I could perhaps sing the lyrics of the whole song in French as opposed to just the chorus; I thought about constructing some kind of found-sound collage about the topic-- and I even thought about what kinds of material I might want to use in order to create something more thought-provoking than didactic and bleeding-hearty, and realized that even looking for such sound bites might well put me in the same category as Pete Townshend a few years back, and then I thought, hey, why not use the actual text of Townshend's statement? Maybe have Anjali read it? And I had a piece of music set to go, a demo for a new Skates & Rays tune called "The Howlaround" which could be adapted easily...

But then I woke up and looked at the paper this morning, and guess who was back in the news! So the job got a little bit easier.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ musical content

The Liberal Media ~ as themselves

"Ici Les Enfants" performed by The Monochrome Set

"Ici Les Enfants" performed by Rex Broome & The Liberal Media

116. "Straight Answers" by Neil Young

As a cursory listen to the original-- and that's the only kind of listen possible-- will reveal, this isn't really a Neil Young tune. The soundtrack to the film Where the Buffalo Roam is credited to Neil Young, who created the score as such, but it also includes a whole bunch of other stuff, including complete tracks by Hendrix and the Beach Boys, and dialogue segments like this one. So I'm still no closer to getting to do a legitimate Neil cover for 39-40 than I was yesterday.

What I've done instead is to manufacture a completely illegitimate Neil cover. First order of business was of course to have the kids recreate the scene on the track The Machine had selected. And then I appended my idea of what an actual Neil Young song called "Straight Answers" might sound like. I didn't write the whole song, partly because of time constraints, partly because I thought that after a single verse my imitation songwriting abilities might flag, and partly because stylistic mimicry is an entirely different exercise from 39-40. It's just meant to suggest that such a song exists and nothing more. I'm also not specifically imitating Neil's voice-- believe me, I can-- but rather writing in his habitual chordal preferences and melody lines that seem to me, from my having listened to a hell of a lot of his recordings, like something he might hit on. The guitar playing is pretty much a straight-up imitation, but so is at least half of what I play on any acoustic guitar I'm given.

Personnel:

Rex ~ guitar and singing

Eden ~ dialogue, stereo left

Miranda ~ dialogue, stereo right

Ridley ~ sound effects and scuffle noises

"Straight Answers" performed (not really) by Neil Young

"Straight Answers" performed by Rex and the Kids

115. "Under the Sun" by The Buzzcocks

So it's summer and the kids are at home with me almost all the time. And we're having an excellent time. But every once in a while I have to sneak off and record a cover song, and, the layout of the house being what it is, that pretty much has to happen in the "family room". So I often have to ask then to be quiet for a few minutes and then try to not screw up a take so I don't put a damper on the summatime fun for too long.

But when it came down to it today, I decided to let them cruise, and even put a mic on them, so they wouldn't have to be annoyed, and I'd get a unique sound on what would otherwise have been a fairly routine Buzzcocks cover. So here they are, enjoying the ever-popular pastime "Watching Each Other Play Videogames". In this case Eden is playing Okami, and I believe Miranda is assisting by consulting an internet site with tips and cheat codes and suchlike. Somwhere in the background I'm recreating a track from a 21st century reunion record by some punk rock pioneers. Summer!

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ guitar and singing

Eden, Miranda and Ridley ~ the important stuff

"Under the Sun" performed by The Buzzcock

"Under the Sun" performed by Rex Broome

114. "45 Grave" by 45 Grave

Exciting new genre: Gothapella!

Personnel: Rex

"45 Grave" performed by 45 Grave

"45 Grave" performed by Rex Broome

113. "Jenna Jameson's Letter to Santa" by Jenna Jameson

I've gotten away from explaining how my covers come to be as they are, but this one requires some background, I fear.

For years I collected the limited-run Christmas compilations issued locally in Los Angeles by the KROQ morning show hosts Kevin & Bean, whose program was at times pretty funny; there were some brilliant pieces on the early compilations, mostly created by Jimmy Kimmel, who was their sidekick/comedy writer at the time. Over the years the returns diminished significantly and by this record, in 2002, you would usually have a lot of rather weak sketches and a handful of salacious "Dear Santa" letters read by celebrities, including this one by Jenna Jameson, whose apparently practiced the pre-internet occupation of "porn star".

So, what to do when The Machine gives you something like this? Well, the initials of the performer jogged my memory back to a Holiday "remix" I made many years ago, combining some hilarious dialogue by Stephen Root as Jimmy James on News Radio with a rather cheesy instrumental version of "God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen" on one of my then-wife's Mannheim Steamroller records, which got some laughs around the office where I worked back then. (Please note that at that time, "remix" meant that I had a record player going into the left channel of an old Radio Shack mixer, and a Walkman with a tape of the dialogue recorded off the air into the right channel, and that's what you get here.)

So I dug up the tape and added a few modern touches, incorporating some of Ms. Jameson's "letter" into a newly crafted bridge section, and there you go, instant holiday cheer. Actually, the new part is pretty lame, but some of my old friends will probably be glad to have the News Radio bit available for public consumption for the first time ever.

In a bizarre instance of full-circle, I went looking for the name of the actor who played character asking Mr. James the questions, and while I did not find him, I did discover that, according to the IMDB, another noted adult film performer, Ron Jeremy, was an uncredited guest star in the same episode. Huh.

Rex Broome & His Holiday Fun-Time Pals are:

Caitlin Blackwood as Amelia Pond

Stephen Root as Jimmy James

Mannheim Steamroller as the Musical Accompanists

Rex Broome as All the Other Stuff

"Jenna Jameson's Letter to Santa" performed by Jenna Jameson

"Jenna Jameson's Letter to Santa" performed by Rex Broome

112. "Right Here" by The Go-Betweens

Another completely classic song by Grant McLennan, one of my absolute favorites about whom I've rhapsodized plenty already. Sometimes you just get out of the way of the song, and that's largely what I did here, other than having some fun endensifying the harmonies here and there. I love this song.

Personnel: Rex

"Right Here" performed by The Go-Betweens

"Right Here" performed by Rex Broome

111. "Lady Madonna" by the Beatles

After a few days of relatively respectful or at least considered covers, I often feel the urge to do one of those more randomized deals. I hit on the idea of walking into record store (in this case Rockaway, within walking distance of my house) and walking up to the super-budget used-and-totally unwanted shelf, finding the first thing that clearly contained instrumentals I'd never heard of, and taking it home for mutilation as a backing track.

And so the dubious new age composition which has replaced the original melody and structure of "Lady Madonna" is actually track called "On My Wings" by an outfit named Nightingale, taken from the sampler compilation The Higher Octave Collection: Music from Around the World for Around the Clock. See, one disc is for day, and the other is for night or something. I added a one-pass gnarly guitar which doesn't really sound gnarled enough in context, and some warped vocals, which do.

Personnel:

Nightingale ~ backing track

Rex Broome ~ guitar, vocal

"Lady Madonna" performed by The Beatles

"Lady Madonna" performed by Rex Broome feat. Nightingale

110. "Pretty As You Feel" by Jefferson Airplane

One problem with recording a song every day is that some days you feel like you have to puke, and you are therefore inevitably recording a song while you have to puke. This is such a day, and such a song.

It is also, so far as I know, the only flat-out goth cover of a Jefferson Airplane song to feature heavily autotuned vocals and borrowed Michael Stipe lyrics. That may well sound disgustingly high-concept, but for some reason the last minute or so of this recording affects me as deeply emotionally as almost anything I've ever recorded. Then again, I have to puke, so factor that into the equation.

Peronnel: Rex, nauseous

"Pretty As You Feel" performed by Jefferson Airplane

"Pretty As You Feel" performed by Rex Broome

109. "Beanbag Chair" by Yo La Tengo

Good fun on this one, with fake mandolins and sporadic fuzz bass and no drum kit and all that stuff.

Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is one of those really quite excellent records which endures not in small part due to a wicked awesome and infinitely name-checkable title, like the Mekons' The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen, Holly & the Italians' The Right to Be Italian, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart by Camper Van Beethoven and every Fall album including a few that I just made up, like Rhetorik-Accelerator! and New Mikronauts Ascent Gruppe. For the diametrically opposite strategy (using your album title to fail it forever), see, if you have time, that Fiona Apple LP with the name that's longer than your average Pynchon novel and seventy-several times as pretentious.

Personnel: Rex

"Beanbag Chair" performed by Yo La Tengo

"Beanbag Chair" performed by Rex Broome

108. "When I'm Gone" by Brenda Holloway

Hey, Dad, listen-- I finally did a whistling solo!

This random selection is an example of one of the reasons I wanted to do 39-40, or indeed why I like hearing my music library randomized in general: I have a lot of cool compilations that are great fun to hear, things like big box sets of soul or surf or classic country or in this case Motown records, and they're great to listen to, but in some ways when you do so you're hearing this monolithic sound, and you don't get to focus in on the songs themselves unless you really have the time to listen more intently than, frankly, most adults including myself ever do. So here's a chance to take a good look at all the facets of an individual jewel, and maybe forge a special relationship with it. I really liked doing this tune.

Personnel: Rex

"When I'm Gone" performed by Brenda Holloway

"When I'm Gone" performed by Rex Broome

107. "Chinese Envoy" by John Cale

A pleasure at last to do my own interpretation of a song by one of my very favorite musical artists in the word. Welsh, of course. They really do excel.

Yesterday's cover set a new standard for 39-40 ass-suckage; today's is one of my favorites. Funny how that happens. Especially remarkable since I love this particular song so very much that I would've had an extremely easy time disappointing myself. I could actually hang out with Cale without feeling shame about this one. I'd be a silent moron, but it would be kind of cool anyway.

Personnel: Rex

"Chinese Envoy" performed by John Cale

"Chinese Envoy" performed by Rex Broome

106. "Satellite" by Elvis Costello

Bar none the worst cover I've done for 39-40, in no way owing to the participation of my lovely and talented wife. At least it has kind of a concept behind it and I haven't yet devolved to my ultimate nightmare circumstance of, like, reading the lyrics into a cellphone or something.

I wouldn't say that this actually gets better a minute and a half in, but it does get different, so you might consider hanging in there at least that far for a laugh. And the last 50 seconds or so have some entertainment value. Of a sort. Sort of, a.

I'm so glad we recorded this after hanging out with Elvis a month ago... I don't know that I could have faced him having done this.

Personnel: Rex and Gen.

"Satellite" performed by Elvis Costello

"Satellite" performed by Rex & Genevieve Broome

105. "Cornflake Girl" by Tori Amos

I think I'm somewhat of a rarity as a casual Tori Amos fan... most people seem to either love her or hate her. I've never seen any reason to do the latter, but I've also never really gone through a period of being severely spellbound by her. I admire her a lot, and I think she takes a lot of unnecessary guff just for being who she is.

This particular song reminds me of a weird, somewhat actually good period of enjoyable radio in the mid '90s when the bloom was off of the grunge explosion and subsequent bandwagoneering, and stations like KROQ didn't quite know what to play until the miracle of Nu Metal was delivered to them by the Gods of Awful Things. There were halting attempts to play some of various Next Big Genres, like electronica Britpop or loungecore or lo-fi indie stuff; none pf them ever achieved dominance, so you had some actually eclectic radio for a while (none of which remained in rotation or is much remembered today). But commercial radio was briefly mixing up Sebadoh, Underworld, Black Grape, The Cardigans, and Portishead. I recall "Cornflake Girl" as one of the most enjoyable singles of that time, and also because I was dead sure that the title was a lift from Billy Bragg's "Body of Water".

Personnel: Rex

"Cornflake Girl" performed by Tori Amos

"Cornflake Girl" performed by Rex Broome