79. "God Bless the Child" by Billie Holiday

Monkey Typing Pool is Jeff Norman, a genius of a sort whose wit and wisdom can be most frequently sampled over at his Architectural Dance Society blog. Over the years, Jeff has shown a willingness to actually create pieces of audio that most people would only think of as something that it would be cool if someone did it: an imaginary Christmas song by Wire, a combination of the Kronos Quartet's version of "Marquee Moon" with Television's original, and so forth. So I wasn't surprised he'd be one of the first to come up with a collaboration for 39-40.

What was really amazing, though, is how completely realized his basic tracks were when I received them. I can't take any credit at all for this arrangement of the Billy Holiday classic, which reminds me a bit of a collision between XTC and Guided by Voices combined with an otherworldly thing which Jeff seems to be able to tap into at will. I just added a few things to it and mixed it. Easy-peasy. If anything I may have cluttered it up a bit much. But it's really good to be able to present a straight-up collaboration, and I hope there are more in the offing.

Personnel:

Jeffrey Norman ~ Everything except:

Rex Broome ~ 12-string guitar, backing vocals, final mix

"God Bless the Child" performed by Billie Holiday

"God Bless the Child" performed by Monkey Typing Pool with Rex Broome

78. "Not a Pretty Girl" by Ani DiFranco

Ani's not an easy prospect to reinterpret. I could care less about gender-shifting the protagonist... a lot of my favorite songs to cover (when I call the shots instead of The Machine) are by women. The trick is that Ani's delivery makes it hard to sing her material without sounding like you're trying to sound like her. Which is kind of interesting, because in the context of her records the songs all sound like they're being sung by other people.

Anyway, I tried to make this sound like it might be being sung by someone with good intentions but a certain lack of self-knowledge and maybe even a touch of subliminated lechery, if that makes sense. The person on the internet discussion board that's very gushy and positive about where they are, but periodically, spectacularly loses his or her shit. I don't know how well that worked.

The music is patched together from the original tracks on a cassette of a 4-track demo I made maybe 15 years ago, coincidentally around the time the album featuring this song came out. What you hear in the background, relatively untouched, is my first ever attempt to record myself playing keyboards. I haven't really advanced much!

Personnel: Rex Broome (1996), Rex Broome (2010)

"Not a Pretty Girl" performed by Ani Difranco

"Not a Pretty Girl" performed by Rex Broome

77. "Dancing the Night Away" by The Motors

I said it was just gonna be me and a banjo, and so it is. Thrill as the too-violent hits overcome the best efforts of my laptop's built-in mic and crumble before its awesome onslaught and shit.

My wife helped to take the cover picture and wondered what Nick Lowe song I was covering. It is kinda funny having ol' Nick as the cover boy for this record, but I don't make the rules. Okay, actually I do make the rules, which leads me to ask if anyone really really digs the cover parodies or if they're just kind of... there, like Everest. Sometimes they amuse me greatly, but other times they just take up a lot of time, which, when you're already recording a whole new song every day, is kinda crazy. Any strong detractor or defenders?

Personnel: Rex

"Dancing the Night Away" performed by The Motors

"Dancing the Night Away" performed Rex Broome

76. "The Raven" by John Stewart

No, not Jon Stewart, but John Stewart (although I have tracks by both in my library). This is the Kingston Trio John Stewart, who recently passed away, causing many people, including my wife, who used to date Jon, to freak out a little bit before they realized that they didn't know who this Stewart was, which made me a little sadder still. Meanwhile my dad, who's one of the bigger K3 fans I've ever known, somehow missed hearing about Stewart's passing when it happened and ended up hearing about it from me a year or so later.

Sometimes I have these grand ambitions to do something not ambitious, and I fail it. This was such a track, although my initial parameters for simplicity-- two unfussy guitars, super-unfussy MIDI bass, and little if any variation on the drum pattern-- survived to the end product. A strange confluence of circumstances, however, turned this into some sort of Arcade Fire-esque epic. The main one was the big family Fleetwood Mac-style vocal session that became cool enough to be featured (although it was actually pretty easy to do), but another thing is that the drum patterns which had been selected as sort of skittery and almost ambient in theory actually turned out to sound almost propulsive in practice, especially when paired with the way I accidentally played Eden's decidedly non-epic nylon-string uke-guitar with a lot more slow-building intensity than I'd intended.

Overall I like it a great deal, though, mostly because my girls really came through on those harmonies; Stewart is kind of a key Broome family artist, so it was fitting in a way. It should be possible to hear me getting choked up and teary-eyed on one of my vocal tracks. I had a moment; I think I'd earned it, and if you haven't heard any real emotion on any recordings yet today, now you have. And tomorrow, just me and a banjo or something... promise.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything but:

Miranda Broome ~ Backing vocals

Genevieve Broome ~ Backing vocals

Eden Hain ~ Backing vocals

"The Raven" performed by John Stewart

"The Raven" performed by Rex Broome

75. "Evil Minded Momma" by Wayne County & the Electric Chairs

Firstly, this is by far the Least Safe For Work 39-40 I've ever done, for more reasons than one, so consider yourself warned. Secondly, look, you can't always do a good parody of the artwork. And sometimes you don't want to. So Eden had drawn this really cool picture which was overall a much better bet. Sadly, the cover art for the Bjork cover seems to have been one of the most memorable things I've posted so far.

And if I was in a bad mood yesterday, look out world, I'm pissed off today. It's an interesting thing producing a piece of "art" every day. What would normally just a crappy day to get over with and forgotten instead produces a semi-permanent musical document. It's overall a good thing-- music exists to document what these heightened emotional states feel like, I think-- but it's not always pretty.

Which brings us to Mr./Ms. Wayne/Jayne County, famous more for being one of the earlier transgender rockers to achieve any notoriety than for any particular musical magic. Even the musically good stuff is more noteworthy for its cultural and confrontational content than any kind of greatness; I have it primarily because it's a touchstone of the early punk scene that I dig, and because other people consider it classic in that context. I guess I used it in that confrontational fashion, too: the bitter and misanthropic vibe was something I could work with. I've always said, regarding my own putative bass playing, that when I pick up the instrument with nothing in particular in mind, I'll usually end up playing either Hank Williams or Peter Hook, and hey, that seems to be just what I did.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything except:

Derek Hanna ~ Drums (radically respeeded)

Charlie Eckstrom ~ Some guitars (ibid.)

Eden Hain ~ Cover art

Embodies big honking portions of other songs which if you don't know what they are you can ask me, and trust me, nobody's missing out on any royalties here.

"Evil Minded Momma" performed by Wayne County & the Electric Chairs

"Evil Minded Momma" performed by Rex Broome

74. "We All Got to Help Each Other" by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition

Some people feel like they've turned into their father when they start having to wear a suit to work. Not a problem for me because neither my father nor myself have ever had to do that. Other people feel like they've turned into their father when people start calling them "Mr. (Surname)", but my dad was never Mr. Broome. He was always Coach Broome. No, for me, I start to feel a little like I've turned into my dad when I start recording Kenny Rogers covers.

But I learned some interesting things prepping this one, one of which was ZOMG THE ENGLISH BEAT TOTALLY STOLE THE ALBUM ART FOR ONE OF THEIR RECORDS FROM KENNY ROGERS!!!11!!1 But it doesn't stop there. I have more affection for the other Mr. Rogers than a lot of folks might, and of course "I Just Dropped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In" is mighty mighty, but The First Edition sounds in some ways almost interesting enough for me to get really into them... I just coincidentally found out a thing or two about their drummer Mickey Jones, and then there's the fact that Rogers was also their bassist, and they sound really great in that '70's rhythm-section way I've started to really dig over the past five or ten years. And that it was none other than Glen Campbell rocking that backwards guitar on "Condition". There's the oddball subject matter on a lot of their tunes, their network variety show, and... well, it all sounds pretty intriguing. If you're me.

Of course my first thought on how to cover this was massive psychedelic dub. There are some wiseass moments on this recording that make me squirm a bit. I try to play my 39-40 with a straight face and "jokes" can read as contempt for the material. I don't want that, but at the same time, I was pretty angry about this that and the other thing today, so my filters were down, I guess, and it was something new, so I left them on there this time.

Personnel: Rex

Embodies big chunks of a couple of other tunes again. References available upon request.

"We All Got to Help Each Other" performed by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition

"We All Got to Help Each Other" performed by Rex Broome

73. "Medication" by Primal Scream

You'll either get this one instantly and entirely or not at all.

Again, there's a story as to how this happened, but I'm keeping it. I'm currently finding myself more often than not of the Dylan "a song is anything that walks around on its own" frame of mind. These songs have all been walking without my help for years. I am at best helping them across the street.

Primal Scream is a weird artist. In one sense I like them probably more than I should, but I also have more problems with them than I should with an artist I really like. The main issue is that their straight-up rock material usually strikes me as so banal and tossed-off as to suggest that they're not even made by the same folks who craft the great trippy dubby psyche-y stuff that they do so very well, never better than on Vanishing Point. And they're so good at crafting monster covers of songs that are so fantastic to begin with-- "Slip Inside This House", "Five Years Ahead of My Time", etc.-- that it's hard to imagine them being into the Black Crowes-sounding stuff themselves, but there it is.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Noises.

Embodies a big whole chunk of a separate tune by Mr. Lewis Reid.

"Medication" performed by Primal Scream

"Medication" performed by Rex Broome

72. "Little Latin Lupe Lu" by The Righteous Brothers

I've never met Lisa Dunn... she lives in Morgantown, WV, and is a friend of Mr. Tom Heckman. One of the first decisions I made about how to cover this not exactly culturally progressive tune was to do it in Spanish, which I do not speak. I put out a call on Facebook to anyone who might be able to help on the vocals. Living as I do in a city where there are roughly equal amounts of Spanish and English speakers, I figured this would be easy, and so of course the first volunteer I got was from Appalachia. Which is just about absurd enough to be true. Tom recorded Ms. Dunn in Morgantown, sent the vocal along to me, and I built it from there.

The girls of Braine didn't end up being able to contribute nearly as much as I'd hoped. Perhaps as some form of compensation, I actually used MIDI for only the second time ever (at least in the way it's meant to be used)... the sequency stuff on yesterday's track was really my first attempt to use it sensible at all, and today's seemed to positively demand a horn line, so I gave it a shot. I guess I am belatedly picking up some musical skills these days. Old dog new tricks...

Personnel:

Lisa Dunn ~ Vocals and translation

Tom Heckman ~ Recording and engineering (WV)

Eden, Miranda, Ridley ~ Random musical contributions

Rex Broome ~ Recording and engineering (LA), assemblage and etc.

"Little Latin Lupe Lu" performed by The Righteous Brothers

"Little Latin Lupe Lu" performed by Lisa Dunn and Braine

71. "The Sounds of Pain and Pleasure (Track 16)" by Tortura

The joke would be something along the lines of how inevitable it was that one of my many, many '60s bondage LPs would be selected by The Machine sooner rather than later. And if you're curious as to what the hell this is-- and I'd imagine you may well be-- it's this.

One weird, occasionally frustrating thing about using iTunes as my randomizer is that every time I refresh the iTunes DJ thing to see what my next assignment is, I get not just the one track I'll be doing but at least a look at the tracks after that in the playlist, which I won't be doing, and sometimes they seem irritatingly more inspiring than the actual selection. And then sometimes if I'm multitasking and one of my tasks is to listen to the assignment track, I'll space out and suddenly the next tune will come on before I hit pause. Such was the case with the William Conrad track I ended up using as a sample here... I was really surprised and entertained when the opening words came blasting through the headphones.

I almost ruined this track a million times, so I'm grateful that it's listenable at all. Going into it, I had in mind how so many of the audio collage entries have been largely devoid of melody... that's fine, of course, but I thought it would be fun to try to do a tuneful one. Somehow I remembered a demo of a sketch I'd recorded in my bedroom 22 years ago, which I'd later found on a cassette and retroactively entitled "Annoying Bouncy Song" for obvious reasons. It was never going to become a "real" song, but it seems kind of cool here.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything except:

Derek Hanna ~ (Formerly) live drumming

William Conrad ~ Spoken word (from this LP)

Joe Aufricht ~ Vocal samples (from this... erm, thing)

"The Sounds of Pain and Pleasure (Track 16)" performed by Tortura

"The Sounds of Pain and Pleasure (Track 16)" performed by Rex Broome feat. William Conrad & Joe Aufricht

70. "Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" by Robyn Hitchcock

I thought this one was gonna rilly rilly suck balls, but I like the way it turned out quite a lot. I could tell the story of how it evolved into something totally different from what I'd planned, but here's a totally different story for ya.

Of course this (once again) isn't a Robyn Hitchcock composition; it's a cover of a Van Morrison song. So the first thing I did was to go back and listen to the original. Except for the part where I didn't have the original. I was actually surprised to discover that I don't have, and on reflection must never have had, Van's Verdon Fleece album. Somewhere between knowing a bunch of the songs on it and having seen its iconic cover art millions of times over the years, I just got to thinking I had it. But I don't. And now I'm not sure if I'd ever really heard the original version of "Linden Arden" before. Maybe I did on a cassette dub of some dodgy Van compilation I seem to recall possessing at one point, but it's equally possible that I've only ever heard Hitchcock's version, which is pretty easy to mentally retroengineer into what Morrison's sounds like. I just don't know. In any case, I have the record now, and even used a (heavily treated) sample of the piano on it on my cover.

The most awesome part of this frankly great tune, for my money, is the couplet "Cleaved their heads off with a hatchet / Lord, he was a drinkin' man"... like that explains everything. I snuck a line of my own in there, sort of offhand, but I really like it... rhymes and everything.

Personnel: Rex (except for that piano sample, and I sliced and diced that up pretty good)

"Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" performed by Robyn Hitchcock

"Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" performed by Rex Broome

69. "He Put It In the Soul of Everyone" by Joey Kneiser

Joey Kneiser's band Glossary are one of the few current bands which I completely adore but nobody else seems to have heard of. I'm not sure why that should be, since lesser lights cut from not dissimilar cloth seem to have no trouble becoming critical and hipster darlings, but none of them rock my world the way Glossary does. Their record How We Handle Our Midnights helped me through the lousiest period of my adult life, and not just because it was there; Kneiser's songs seemed to be written in the only language appropriate for those wasted days. I've been devoted ever since. I guess Joey is kind of Paul Westerberg now, since somebody has to do it; there's a certain melody to which he returns again and again, and yet I never tire of it. It's probably the basic melody to which I was attuned at birth.

Anyway, this beautiful tune from his recent (free!) solo album The All-Night Bedroom Revival-- which again seems completely to speak to the question of why the hell anyone would do what I'm doing right now on this blog-- might've been a fun thing to turn into a big rock number or otherwise mutate, but because I'm unusually evangelistic for this artist, I've done a pretty faithful rendition, reasoning that if anyone follows up on Kneiser or Glossary on the basis of this recording, they're not going to want to hear something radically different. I have on the whole not a whole lot of evidence that anyone follows my recommendations, and I usually do not attempt to "convert" anyone to my favorite artists... and I actually have no clue how many people even listen to these recordings, but this was an instance in which I felt obliged to dress up and try to be presentable.

There was one word I couldn't quite make out; I sang "resonance", but it sounds like "Residents", which changes the meaning of the line rather severely.

Personnel: Rex

"He Put It in the Soul of Everyone" performed by Joey Kneiser

"He Put It in the Soul of Everyone" performed by Rex Broome

68. "The Purgatory Line" by Drive-By Truckers

Sometimes you get put off of a band by arguably incidental factors like the production of their debut record, the artwork of the first record you see by them (I am still haunted by the cover of Tripping Daisy's I Am an Electrical Firecracker or whatever the hell it's called) or, perhaps most deadly of all, their name. I wouldn't say that I hate the name "Drive-By Truckers"... it's more that upon hearing it I immediately filed it under "ignore all future occurrences of these words" as I would with names like "Bloodlegion" or "The Rockin' Good Time Boys". Something about the combination of the name of the band with the album title Southern Rock Opera suggested the sort of arch insincere goofing on country music for which I have increasingly less time as I get older. And it took a few years worth of slowly realizing that people whose musical opinions I respect actually like this band for me to give them a try.

It's been a while since I "Bragged" a song on 39-40 and this seemed like a pretty good candidate. The original has very little guitar and is even in a bit of an odd key for guitar; I went ahead and played it in that key just for fun, but I changed the tempo and added a sort of riff thing to it for fun. And then at the end I sorta tacked on a little piece of a Blake Babies song I didn't entirely remember, but which had a similar melodic figure in it. The guitar is unfortunately a little out of tune... it's one of those things that happen when I do live takes like this. It takes a while to warm up to a full-length performance with any kind of soul to 'em. I have to remember that by that time the guitar is likely to have imperceptibly drifted out of tune, and maybe, like, fix it.

Personnel: Rex

Additional lyrics from "Girl In a Box" by Blake Babies

"The Purgatory Line" performed by Drive-By Truckers

"The Purgatory Line" performed by Rex Broome

67. "The Locust Girls" by The Go-Betweens

Ukuleles got really small frets, is all I have to say.

Well, actually I have a few other things to say, like how I'm still pretty seriously haunted by the loss of Grant McLennan. As a songwriter I've usually felt like what I do is a little more similar to Robert Forster's material, but it's Grant's stuff that most often amazes me for how inexplicable its perfectness is. Small words, small melodies, almost always at least one completely original image that seems utterly casual in its construction-- in this case, it's "Feelin' the rain come nailin' down"-- but stops me dead in my tracks even after many, many repeat listens. Seriously. "Bye Bye Pride" has followed me around for ages; it was, along with "Visions of Johanna" and "What Goes On", among the first songs I learned to play for Miranda as lullaby-ish things when she was a newborn, which means that they were also the first songs I could sing and play by heart all the way through. Miranda may think I wrote it.

I got a little ahead of myself in recording this one and got the structure wrong, which gave me a little problem to work out when I recorded the vocal. I decided to just write my own third verse, which maybe Grant would've done. That verse is dedicated to Ridley. I think Ridley could be in any number of Go-Betweens songs.

Personnel: Rex

"The Locust Girls" performed by The Go-Betweens

"The Locust Girls" performed by Rex Broome

66. "Sweet Son of a Bitch" by Afghan Whigs

This literally came within seconds of sounding completely different. I actually recommend, as I usually don't, that you listen to my recording before you read this, so you can evaluate it on its own merits before the backstory ruins it forever.

Okay. Now, since the original is a very brief experimental sound collage, I was going to take this as an opportunity to once again demo one of my originals, and then, to be cute and rationalize it as a cover, take the original Afghan Whigs track, slow it down until it expanded from twenty-some seconds to nearly three minutes, and overlay that on my new tune, cleverly boasting that what could be a more complete "cover" than a recording which contained every last detail of the original, magnified and amplified? And I completed the demo for my original song, spending a particularly great deal of time and effort "perfecting" the drums. Then I respeeded the Whigs track and laid it over the whole thing.

But in listening to the respeeded track, I found that it... sounded pretty cool to me. And so did the drums I spent all that time on. So on a whim I muted everything but the drums and the slowed-down Whigs snippet, and I really really liked it. So that happened.

I was going to add some blatherings about how Afghan Whigs are a band I've always assumed I'd really get into heavily some day, but that day hasn't yet come. But enough navel-gazing already; I have to add vocals to the demo of the newly-minted song whose drum track you hear on this one. It's called "Norma Corona, What Have You Done?"...

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Assemblage and engineering-type stuff

Derek Hanna ~ Original drum tracks

Embodies the entirety of the recording "Sweet Son of a Bitch" by Afghan Whigs

"Sweet Son of a Bitch" performed by Afghan Whigs

"Sweet Son of a Bitch" performed by Rex Broome

65. "Perfume-V" by Pavement

I have kind of a thing about doing the same type of recording two days in a row, even when it makes sense, and now that I'm posting this one I think I should probably get over it because this might well have been more fun to listen to in the excessive mold of the MBV cover from yesterday. But I'm okay with how this turned out. It got a little more stark (not so much so that it was a skyscraper) but not cloyingly faux-rootsy. I sort of feel like that angle was covered when Nickel Creek did "Spit on a Stranger". Except in their case it wasn't faux, but you get the point.

Appropos to nothing, I don't think I realized that Nickelback wasn't Nickel Creek for quite some time. For a year or so I kept hearing people complain vociferously about what I thought was an unassuming little neo-bluegrass band and I just didn't get it. I still couldn't pick a Nickelback song out of a police lineup, which I suspect is the point, but at least I know they aren't the guys who did that Pavement cover.

Personnel: Rex

"Perfume-V" performed by Pavement

"Perfume-V" performed by Rex Broome

64. "I Believe" by My Bloody Valentine

I still can't get over the fact that some Hot Topic band got away with naming themselves Bullet for My Valentine. Hell, why not go all the way and call yourself The Jesus & Mary Chair?

When The Machine spits out the MBV, you have a big decision to make. Do you go for a revelatory recontextualization, or just have the most fun ever making some sweet loud soup? Today's answer was that I had a hard time imagining a reworking of the band's sound that would be any more radical, or for that matter successful, than what Japancakes did to Loveless a few years back. So I opted for loud soup... just a slightly different flavor of loud soup. The thing I like most about my version is the "Tomorrow Never Knows"-style backbeat I added to the verses, a part that's very blurry on the original... a move that I think pushes this thing a little closer to being a pop song.

Personnel: Rex

"I Believe" performed by My Bloody Valentine

"I Believe" performed by Rex Broome

63. "Still Life in Mobile Homes" by Japan

A friend of mine compiles yearly sampler collections that go well above and beyond the call of duty, often including an entire disc of cover versions, which is always fun. Early this year I created, as I often do, a big bunch of CDRs of music I'd recently acquired for car listening, which tends to be the way these things get done, and Jeff's covers disc for 2008 (well, 2009 as well, but for some reason this one snuck on a year late) was subsumed into that unholy whole. Anyway.

The cover that particularly caught my attention and had me running it back and forth while driving was a version of "Scary Monsters" which turned out to be more and more basic the further you looked into it. It was essentially a vocal, a drum loop that never altered, and a little keyboard on top with nothing filling out the bass. And that's almost something I wouldn't have thought of, odd as it may seem. I know the covers on 39-40 have a certain ramshackly, half-assy quality, but there are certain things on which I won't cut corners, and it's hard for me to leave drum tracks unmolested for the duration of a song, or a bassline unplayed. Unless particularly inspired to do so. So here's to you, The Vile Bodies: your Bowie cover provided me with a natural template for my Japan cover.

(My not playing bass certainly has nothing to do with being intimidated by Mick Karn nohow.)

Oh, and that's Derek, the drummer in Skates & Rays, on the wall there in the artwork. He, like most rock drummers, is a massive David Sylvian fan and I thought he'd enjoy replacing Mao up there.

Personnel:

Rex ~ Everything

Koto music originally played by Zumi-Kai Instrumental Group

"Still Life in Mobile Homes" performed by Japan

"Still Life in Mobile Homes" performed by Rex Broome

62. "Journey Inwards" by LTJ Bukem

During the 90s I listened to a lot of stuff like this. Some of it has held up better than the rest, but overall the vibe, which is its chief characteristic, of this kind of music has an oddly timeless feel to it. I've largely gone back to guitars, at least in terms of the music I create myself, but I still feel an attachment to this idiom as well.

This was an instance where, when I first listened to the track The Machine had selected for me, I immediately concocted a whole kitchen sink of strategies for remaking it. And then I used almost exactly none of them. I had just picked up an acoustic guitar to work out the chords, and laid down the part as a guide to the structure. But I liked what I heard, copied it and put a weird effect on it that could run in parallel to the clean track, picked a few odd drum loops, and suddenly I was hearing something that would've fit in just fine on one of those killer Ninja Tune compilations. I changed tactics accordingly.

The only thing that did make it through the process was the vocal hook. The original doesn't have one, but I thought my version should. I spent some time searching my mental hard drive for a soundbite or phrase which might reflect the title "Journey Inwards", and I landed on this image I'd done for a flyer many years ago, showing Amorfus the Jelly-Chimera and Little Miranda descending into some kind of post-narrative demimonde, drawn quite some time before my real daughter Miranda was born. Naturally I had to have her provide the voice for the character, and then we were 1/3 of the way to a Braine track. Ridley added percussion (with our now-signature DolphinSonic effect treatment) and Eden did a couple of viola tracks, and there you go.

This is so totally damned much better than my earlier electronica experiments on 39-40...

Personnel:

Miranda Broome ~ Dialogue

Ridley Broome ~ DolphinSonic percussion

Eden Hain ~ violas

Rex Broome ~ everything else

"Journey Inwards" performed by LTJ Bukem

"Journey Inwards" performed by Braine

61. "House of Mirrors" by Will and the Bushmen

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

"House of Mirrors" performed by Will and the Bushmen

"House of Mirrors" performed by Rex Broome

60. "Bury Me" by Dwight Yoakam

I'm not entirely sure what the story behind this Yoakam collection is... it's a bunch of acoustic performances, maybe demos, including some like this one which also appear on Guitars Cadillacs Etc. Etc.; the cassette belonged to my wife and she recalls it as being something she had before Dwight was signed, and the cassette itself bears this out if you, like me, are more familiar than you should be with what crappy blank cassettes which company was selling when during the period when a lot of companies were selling crappy cassettes. It should be noted that the two cheapos pictured here probably sold for enough cash to buy you like 25 CDRs today, and that's with no adjustment for inflation. We were gettin' screwed, is all I can say.

Say, you ask, are those real drums? Why, yes, they sort of conditionally are. In the course of collecting drum tracks from everywhere I could think of lately, I remembered that Skates & Rays had tracked but never mixed a bunch of tunes for Heckman's Christmas record a while back, and I still had the basic tracks. One of the tunes was a version of Neil Young's "Star of Bethlehem" which we'd radically made over into something that sounded like Neil Young playing one of his quiet songs louder. I was just looking into those tracks when The Machine threw this song, which has a similar rhythmic signature, at me to cover. Maybe half an hour's worth of editing Derek's drum track and I had this. Which is refreshing in the extreme.

Always fun to get to do the Thunderhill thing on the bass. Takes me back.

Personnel:

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Rex Broome ~ Everything else

"Bury Me" performed by Dwight Yoakam

"Bury Me" performed by Rex Broome