231. "Just" by Radiohead

Requested by Ken Ostrander.

Second in the Autumn Sickness Cycle on 39-40, I did attempt to use my voice on this one, after a fashion. What I couldn't get to happen was the overall mastery of the structure, chords, and performance of a song that's completely unfamiliar to me. Which, I know, I know, and I thought about writing about it here but I really just feel to ill to delve into it, but hey, no, I don't know from Radiohead albums. In my life as indie whatever hipster douchebagge retro alterative postpunker dude guy, I am constantly surrounded by Radiohead and so have never felt compelled to own any. But that's not the point... the point is that I had real trouble physically mastering the playing of the thing, and it ain't that hard, and furthermore if I've proven anything with this enterprise it's that I can learn how to play even kind of weird songs really quickly when I'm healthy, so that's how lousy I feel.

Anyway, instead I produced this weird-sounding thing, which hopefully Radiohead would appreciate at least in concept because I hear they're all experimental and cutting-edge and shit. It may sound like I'm playing random nonsense here, but I am not; the acoustic guitar is playing what I guess I'd call "cypher chords": every chord stands in for a specific chord in the real chord sequence of the song. The bass is playing the root notes of the real chords in the song, and the vocal cues off of that. The part at the beginning of the bridge is the only bit where the guitar plays the real chords, too, and that's because the online tab I looked up when I was trying to work out the parts was totally wrong in that part, so I figured it out for myself, and even though I abandoned the playing of the actual chords I felt that I'd put in too much sick-time on that working that bit up to let it go to waste, and I also thought it might be kind of interesting to have a suddend shift into musical agreement between the instruments right when the vocal went away. I doubt I was right about that.

Personnel: Rex

"Just" performed by Radiohead

"Just" performed by Rex Broome