Requested by Aaron (I'm not entirely sure which one).A few songs deep into this request format and a couple of patterns or tendencies are already starting to reveal themselves to me.
One is that I feel a lot more obliged to do a good job on each cover, because hey, someone actually wanted to hear what I would do to that particular song. And I also feel a little less inclined to take drastic risks with the material. Now, I'm thinking that all it will take is one major disaster of a cover, or one last-minute rush job, to break down that barrier. But I haven't hit the wall head on yet.
Another thing is that it's a little more frustrating to look at the finite list of potential songs, which average about 10 or so a day, and seeing the one or two you really really want to do before the randomizer picks a different one for you. This day's list had "Typical Girls" by The Slits on it. I'd really like to take a crack at that one. Anyway...
Go Sailor entered my consciousness very recently in an odd way. At some point late last year I was doing the Ultimate and Final Universal Clean-Up of my iTunes library, correcting tags, deleting redundant tracks, and identifying mysterious tracks. This latter part was tricky. I've absorbed big chunks of a lot of peoples' libraries over the years, and not everyone is as particular about their file tagging as I am. As I chipped away at the mystery tracks, I began to realize that a big chunk of them came from the same source, someone who was incredibly gifted at being wrong about stuff. You could see that all of the tracks had the same bitrate and were created around the same time. Most of them didn't have an artist name, but most of the ones that did were wrong; furthermore, the cited artist often didn't generally sound anything like the track in question. Then there were the track names themselves, which were often wrong in a variety of ways, sometimes all at once. Many of them were named after a phrase in the song that was not the title, and, better yet, the phrase used was misheard to the point where just listening to the song you knew it was wrong. And look, it's fine to get stuff all screwed up. But it's sort of a lot of work to tag stuff to begin with, so it just seemed odd to me that someone would go to all that trouble, over and over again, having absolutely no idea what they were mislabeling. Longstoryshorttoolate, several of those mystery tracks turned out, after a great deal of lyric-googling, to be by Go Sailor. (A whole bunch of the rest of them turned out to be the Stiff Records box set, but by the time I worked that out I had tagged most of them as original singles, complete with artwork from the 45's, and I left 'em that way for fun.)
Fun facts: the 13-string makes a prominent appearance again, and I used real amplifiers for the first time in an embarrassingly long while (during summer with the kids at home I tended to us more amp simulators just so as not to ruin their cartoon watching or game playing). Also, the drum samples used on this one include swipes from two separate tunes with the word "Gut" in the title, by two separate artists.
Personnel: Rex
Requested by Aaron from Fegmaniax. And this is awesome.
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