145. "Love" by The Virgin Sleep

Using GarageBand in a garage surrounded by garage stuff, one eventually succumbs to the impulse to USE IT TONIGHT.

The original song here is something I hadn't really listened to closely before, and it's pretty interesting... I might have to see if I can find anything else by The Virgin Sleep. It's kind of weird even by late '60s psych standards. The chord progressions per se aren't that odd, but they seem to come at you in a nearly random order, making it hard to believe the band knew how to play which part when, but then there's a fairly ornate string part to go along with it, so it's likely more thought-out than it seems. I wonder if the rest of their stuff, if there is any, has the same odd mixture of the ramshackle and the polished. The well of nearly-forgotten bizarre bands from that era seems inexhaustible.

Personnel: Rex

"Love" performed by The Virgin Sleep

"Love" performed by Rex Broome

144. "Mammal" by They Might Be Giants

A couple of different ideas collided on this one. Practically speaking ("IRL" if you will, and I'm by no means certain that you will) I just didn't decide on one single way to tackle this tune, with the habitual Billy Bragg approach starting me off, the synth bass being just sort of practical as I don't have a bass guitar with me here in WV, and the club beatz just kind of growing out of that. As far as how it turned out, it's an example of how not having too tangible of an idea what you're doing can result in something a lot more original than what happens when you do. The naff guitar tone isn't really my kind of thing, but it seems to work on this one. The vocal turned out somewhere between John Linell's original and a nerdier Mike Ness.

Personnel: Rex

"Mammal" performed by They Might Be Giants

"Mammal" performed by Rex Broome

143. "The Hawk" by Tom Verlaine

Tom Verlaine is not just one of my favorite guitarists-- even people who have only heard Marquee Moon twice know they're supposed to say that-- but one of my very favorite overall artists as well. I'll make a stronger case for his deserving stature as a great songwriter than perhaps Mr. Miller himself ever would. So it's a bit of a disappointment that at this late date in 39-40, and with so very many Verlaine recordings ratting around in my library (quite a few more than are strictly meant to exist), The Machine hands me a performance of a Kris Kristofferson cover. It's a bit of an obscurity, and my making it available here is thus an accidental public service for which you're quite welcome.

In fact, I wasn't able to find a copy of Kristofferson's original, so this truly is a cover of a cover, although thanks to the Internet I believe I restored some lyrics that Tom got sideways.

I very rarely play guitar without a pick, but here I did, trying to both play and sing very, very softly for a change. The noise on the vocal track that sounds sort of like tape his that seems to rise and fall in volume at random is in fact the wind outside the open garage door here in Great Oak Valley. You may be able to hear some locusts in the background, too, if you listen dangerously closely.

Personnel: Rex

"The Hawk" performed by Tom Verlaine

"The Hawk" performed by Rex Broome

141. "The Salad Song (Accompaniment)" by Yamaha Music Foundation

Eden's been asking me to record a theme tune for her ongoing vlogging programs for a while, so I took the opportunity when handed a somewhat cheesy instrumental by the machine. I was initially planning on writing lyrics for this, but I ended up liking the reconfiguration on its own as instrumental theme music. It just got a little more elaborate as it went on. It's been a while since I did one of these relatively straight-up "remix" covers, and it seems that I've gotten a lot better at it along the way, picking up tricks here and there for other purposes that can be integrated into something a lot less clunky than my early efforts. It's probably imperceptible, but I know it's smoother, and that's growth of a kind. Possibly malignant.

The end results owe a great deal to a period of obsessive listening to The Go! Team and overexposure to the theme song to Phineas & Ferb.

Personnel:

Rex ~ musical things

Eden ~ cover art

"The Salad Song (Accompaniment)" performed by Yamaha Music Foundation

"The Salad Song (Accompaniment)" performed by Rex Broome

140. "This Land Is Your Land" by The Thunder Hill Singers with The Foggy Island Singers

I did all kinds of things wrong on this one, but the primary concept is awfully strong. For one thing, the same person sings the first verse on the original (in 1964) as sings the first verse on the cover (in 2010), so you basically have the same guy, my dad Jim Broome, revisiting the same song 46 years apart. Then there's the fact that his granddaughter sings the fourth verse, with me doing one inbetween, so it's multigenerational to the max. In fact, the choir that sings the chorus is so full of people who are parents or children of each other that it's kind of mind-boggling.

The original comes from a "hootenanny" on Nantucket Island in '64, in collaboration with another folk group, The Foggy Island Singers, who drifted into obscurity. In contrast, the cover was recorded as Dad and I are rehearsing for yet another reunion of Thunderhill (the final post-folk-era version of The Thunderhill Singers) which will feature another of the singers at the Hoot on the island back in the day. Some things just don't die.

Personnel:

Jim Broome ~ lead vocal, first verse

Rex Broome ~ lead vocal, second verse; instruments and stuff

Eden Hain ~ lead vocal, third verse

Miranda Broome ~ lead vocal, fourth verse

The Pratt Family Singers ~ Patricia Broome, Genevieve Broome, Ridley Broome, Miranda Broome, Eden Hain, Rex Broome, Jim Broome

"This Land Is Your Land" performed by The Thunder Hill Singers with The Foggy Island Singers

"This Land Is Your Land" performed by The Pratt Family Singers

139. "Give, Give, Give Me More, More, More" by The Wonder Stuff

It's my first recording from The Field, with my stripped-down recording rig deep in the woods of West Virginia. The finest new tool available to me in this setting is my dad's old Martin D-28, so of course I set out to use it right away. And then I broke a string right toward the end of the first take, and don't have another phosphor bronze one available to me right now, so it's a good deal that the take was not too bad.

I can actually remember being somewhat skeptical about The Wonder Stuff when this song came out, but I was won over by the time their near-perfect Never Loved Elvis record came out. And it's hard not to feel bad for them almost immediately thereafter, as they along with many of the other best bands of their ilk seemed rightfully stymied by the pile of odious crap that rock and roll became in the early '90's, and the fact that said pile of crap was so much more lucrative and critically lionized than they had ever been. All told that made for a pretty short heyday for this band and quite a few other artists from that era. A lot of them have gotten second winds as smaller scale recording and touring artists supported by smaller groups of more ardent fans thanks to the internet, and that's a good thing for bands whose initial runs foundered for depressing industry-related reasons. And you know, when I started that last sentence I was just generalizing, but I've now found out that The Wonder Stuff is indeed active again, so there you go.

Personnel: Rex

"Give, Give, Give Me More, More, More" performed by The Wonder Stuff

"Give, Give, Give Me More, More, More" performed by Rex Broome

138. "Side 2 - 26" by Star Trek (3rd Season Cast & Crew)"

Don't worry about the cover image for my version of this one. It's a long story, and inside joke, and you had to be there, and all that.

The core of the music that we invented for this thing was Eden and myself improvising in real time, her on ukulele and me on 12-string. Eden had just basically taught herself to play the basics of uke in the half hour or so before we recorded it, so we thought that was the best idea ever. The cool thing was she really dialed in to the idea of reacting improvisationally in the sort of experimental noise-jazz idiom very quickly.

Personnel:

Eden ~ ukulele and ambient vocals

Star Trek Cast & Crew ~ incomprehensible voiceover

hedgehog1 ~ voiceover ~ comprehensible voiceover

Rex ~ other stuff

"Side 2 - 26" performed by Star Trek (3rd Season Cast & Crew)

"Side 2 - 26" performed by Rex & Eden

137. "Downtown at Dawn" by Richard Hell & the Voidoids

I love Richard Hell, but there is definitely a way in which he's the George Lucas of punk rock, constantly revising his two seminal records with the Voidoids, which were brilliant to begin with. The version of "Downtown at Dawn" here, from the Spurts anthology, is drastically different from the one that originally appeared on the still-underrated Destiny Street record, and it's been further reconfigured along with that whole record for his recent Destiny Street Repaired release. Might seem an odd fetish for perfection and revisionism from a guy who's credited as inventing the in-the-moment punk rock aesthetic, but Hell certainly never claimed that mantle for himself and I think he sees his work as being about something totally different from that. Inarresting character, Hell.

The cover of Destiny Street is a semi-parody of the sleeve for Bringing It All Back Home. I took the song in a direction that might've been better suited to Blood on the Tracks or even Time Out of Mind.

Personnel: Rex

"Downtown at Dawn" performed by Richard Hell & the Voidoids

"Downtown at Dawn" performed by Rex Broome

136. "Walk Through the Bottomland" by Lyle Lovett

Lyle's Pontiac remains a singular favorite of mine... there's something indefinably magic about it, owing probably to some mostly-forgotten emotional specifics associated with the time when I first heard it, which would've been my late teens. It was also a record the whole family liked and so it'd be high on the playlist for vacation listening on the long car ride between West Virginia and (usually) South Carolina. No other LL album comes close for me, although that may also owe a lot to what I call The American Music Club Principle, which holds that, for an artist whose work is of uniformly high quality, one will tend to adopt the first record one hears as one's favorite.

The buried self-editorial comment following the first chorus is there because I was begging Gen to do the harmony vocal, and she demurred, feeling that she couldn't do it. In the process of trying to get her to do it, I demonstrated the part, and then decided on a whim I could handle it myself, and was a little surprised at how well it worked.

Personnel: Rex

"Walk Through the Bottomland" performed by Lyle Lovett

"Walk Through the Bottomland" performed by Rex Broome

135. "The Little Drummer Boy" by Miracle Legion

Huh. I wish I'd gotten just about any other tune by Miracle Legion, who are a fairly obscure band I happen to really like for fairly obscure reasons, to cover. And not just because of the Christmas thing, although that really is the most persistent thorn in my side in this project. Anyway, this doesn't even sound that much like Miracle Legion. Neither does Johnny Cash, and I'm submitting that as my rationale for why this cover sounds the way it does.

Personnel: Rex

"The Little Drummer Boy" performed by Miracle Legion

"The Little Drummer Boy" performed by Rex Broome

134: "This One's On You" by Ken Stringfellow

Definitely the quickest turnaround between a purchase and a 39-40 cover thus far, this comes from a Stringfellow album I picked up last month fer cheep. The tune is a little overlong in its original version and even more so in the acoustic format I'm sort stuck with for now, so I cut a bit here and there (and picked up the tempo).

Personnel: Rex

"This One's On You" performed by Ken Stringfellow

"This One's On You" performed by Rex Broome

133. "Power of Independent Trucking" by Big Black

Time is tight, or I would've added a banjo track on this one.

Personnel: Rex

"The Power of Independent Trucking" performed by Big Black

"The Power of Independent Trucking" performed by Rex Broome

132. "People Do It All The Time" by Stereolab

So I'm thinking, what would make this sound a lot less like Stereolab? And what I come up with is having it played exclusively on a whole bunch of acoustic guitars. And then I'm thinking, what would then make it sound even more like Stereolab than it did to begin with? And what I come up with is changing the time signature to something weirder. It's not very nuanced or anything, but I think it works well enough.

Along the way I did some preparatory experimentation with what kind of bass sound I could get without a bass. It didn't exactly work, but it created a kind of insane noise that has its own use.

Personnel: Rex

"People Do It All The Time" performed by Stereolab

"People Do It All The Time" performed by Rex Broome

131. "Hands on the Wheel" by Willie Nelson

This one was going to be a Braine track, but time ran out and all that made it onto there was Miranda's bassline. So a lot of what ended up on here was meant to be my sloppy guide tracks for the kids to play correctly. It's not ideal, but at this very moment I have to work even more quickly than usual.

Red Headed Stranger has also been covered in its entirety by Carla Bozulich, just a little before the whole-album-cover concept started to get ever so slightly played out. I can't recall offhand what she did to this particular track, but the whole record was quite good. If I were to pick an entire album to cover like that, I'm not quite sure what I would go for... John Cale's Paris 1919 comes to mind; Tom Verlaine's Dream Time would be fun, and if I had to turn it out in really short order I could always do Zuma or Fables of the Reconstruction. I could probably come up with some more interesting ones if I had to, but I gotta go record some Stereolab while I still have a modicum of energy left...

Personnel: Rex, with Miranda on bass

"Hands on the Wheel" performed by Willie Nelson

"Hands on the Wheel" performed by Rex & Miranda

130. "Dammit" by The Kelley Deal 6000

This one took on a life of its own as I was recording it. I like the way it turned out... in many ways it sounds more like what I would've thought a "typical" 39-40 cover might sound like before I actually started doing them.

Personnel: Rex, with additional background QWERTY keyboard by Gen

"Dammit" performed by The Kelly Deal 6000

"Dammit" performed by Rex Broome

129. "Levi Stubbs' Tears" by Billy Bragg

Considering how often I've cited Billy Bragg as an inspiration for my entire approach to solo performance, here on 39-40 and in any live setting, it's a damn shame that I didn't have time to do any kind of real justice to this song, which is... well, it's great, really just one of the great songs of forever times. And something that should be heard by anyone who thinks Billy's all politics. It's easy for me to love his political stuff, since it's right on and also incredibly doesn't suck in the least, but there's too much heart and soul to him for that pigeonhole to fit, or something like that.

Personnel: Rex

"Levi Stubbs' Tears" performed by Billy Bragg

"Levi Stubbs' Tears" performed by Rex Broome

128. "F Is For Fiend" by Famous Monsters

I think... well, I'm actually sure that I put out about as much surf guitar as I have in me for at least a month's time on the Beausoleil tune last week, so I arranged this one as an acoustic tune. And somehow I made it substantially longer, which was the least of my intentions. Sorry about that.

Personnel: Rex

"F Is For Fiend" performed by Famous Monsters

"F Is For Fiend" performed by Rex Broome

127. "Cowgirl in the Sand" by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

A few procedural things before launching into the usual nonsense. Firsty, today marks the last belabored tribute/parody cover art for a while. The hiatus is necessary because I'm about to go on vacation to my hometown in West Virginia, and not only do I need to focus on getting ready for that, I also have to bang out a bunch of extra cover songs just in case I end up in a travel situation which won't allow me to record anything within a 24 hour timespan. Probably won't happen, but you never know... however, I'm quite likely not to have the time to crank out the cover images to go with said recordings, so I'm putting them on hold until I return. It's also a function of having to leave some of my hardware behind... I am taking mixers, mics, mic stands, guitars and all manner of other paraphernalia, but there's a limit, even for me.

You'll still get a unique cover image for each song. It's just more likely to be a snapshot of something related to the creation of the song or whatever, which, given the different situations in which I'll be recording and the people with whom I'll be collaborating ought to be interesting enough.

So, "Cowgirl in the Sand". Well, I've known how to play this one for more'n twenty years, most like. I pretty much learned to play lead guitar by developing scales as I played along with Neil Young & Crazy Horse records. Over the years I've gotten better. And then worse, and then better again. By all rights my chops should be at an all-time high right now, but one can still have an off night, you know.

Personnel: Rex

"Cowgirl in the Sand" performed by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

"Cowgirl in the Sand" performed by Rex Broome

126. "Show Me The Way" by Dinosaur Jr

I don't know if I've ever heard the original Peter Frampton version of this song. I think I may have very recently and remarked upon it in passing, but it didn't stick to my mind enough to displace this version, which I've heard really quite a lot over the years. It's a weird thing about my youth that I didn't really ever hear the pop music of the time for which a lot of my peers have a great deal of nostalgia, ironic or otherwise. In my house we basically heard the country radio of the day, which had both great stuff (the Outlaws were out in force) and not so great stuff (it was also Urban Cowboy time), and I didn't really get out to other kids' places much, living way back in the woods as I did. Later on, at about 14 or 15, we got cable, and I checked into MTV very briefly, but for the most part Talking Heads, R.E.M. and the voracious consumption of rock lit steered me right out of mainstream pop music and within a year of starting to listen to rock and roll I was all about Sonic Youth and Husker Du, the Velvets and Throwing Muses, Television and the Voidoids. There are some really popular arena rock songs that I don't know which of those bands it is. Now, I don't think this makes me really cool or anything... it's just how it worked out. But it has some nifty advantages... lacking that haze of nostalgia, I can experience a fairly real thrill at realizing belatedly how awesome Fleetwood Mac often was, meanwhile not having to justify my non-existent prog-rock phase to my punk rock self. That sort of thing.

Um, what was I saying? Oh yeah. Anyway, I purposefully didn't look up the Frampton tune and to further solidify this as a cover of Dinosaur's cover, I recorded myself playing and singing along to the original in the headphones. I may have overdone my J. Mascis impersonation, but the point of it was to be sort of singing it on the fly, not intimately familiar with the melody line Mascis wasn't entirely locked into himself. I love Dinosaur Jr. and some of their covers are truly brilliant, but they really took a dump on their contributions to two of the early, good tribute albums with their vivisections of "Feel a Whole Lot Better" and "Lotta Love", so they sorta had this coming.

Personnel: Rex

"Show Me the Way" performed by Dinosaur Jr

"Show Me the Way" performed by Rex Broome

125. "The Night Is Very Soft" by The Church

A rare instance of the tribute album cover image dictating the specifics of the cover recording, and I am glad of it.

Quite a few of the recordings I've done for 39-40 sound rather a lot like songs by The Church despite the fact that none of them have been Church covers. My methods and playing and instruments and the way I use my lower vocal range just kind of tilt that way. But I really didn't want to just do a slavish cover for the first song by the band selected for me by The Machine. It was very tempting nonetheless, not least because the original recording starts with solo drums, making it very easy to create a perfect drum loop and build from there.

But before I started I gave some thought to recreating the iconic cover image of the Hindsight compilation. Well, I don't know, it's iconic enough in the real world that there's a t-shirt of it, and it's iconic to me because I used to stare longingly at the cover of the double-cassette edition of it that I couldn't afford as a young Church-head. Doesn't matter, the point is that my electric 12-string, which is ironically more or less the same one Marty Willson-Piper normally uses, just doesn't have a headstock that looks anything like that thanks to Rickenbacker's distinctive perpendicular-to-itself way of installing tuners on their twelves. But my Epiphone acoustic does. So that's the guitar I ended up using on both the cover image and the recording. Except for the raging feedback bit; that involves an electric and moreover two Fender amplifiers facing each other and mic'ed in stereo. It made my stepdaughter's brain explode even though she was a flight of stairs and a closed door away... she told me so.

Personnel: Rex

"The Night Is Very Soft" performed by The Church

"The Night Is Very Soft" performed by Rex Broome