Rebooting after the longest layoff and deepest difficulty in seeing the light at the end of this here tunnel. November's tracks were largely bashed out in batches, and that led to nights and even weeks of me not doing a new tune. The effect of this was not so much me getting rusty, but more me getting incredibly embarrassed about the whole project. It just sounds awful to me right now, and I'm sort of scared to start singing again because I really don't like the way it's all turned out. At the moment.I'm allowing myself to dodge that bullet at the moment by posting something I found by sheer chance over the weekend when the internet was down at our house for a really long time. My wife was trawling through some old video files and discovered a few artifacts of a December 19, 2007 gig at the now defunct Scene Bar in Glendale at which I did double duty in Skates & Rays and The Chiggers. Happily it includes evidence of what was probably the only live performance of my song "I Can't Even Hear Myself Drink", sung by Nigel, but more relevantly to the project at hand it also had a complete, albeit lo-fi performance of this bizarre arrangement of "Frosty the Snowman" cooked up by Nigel for this particular one-time-only expanded and accordion-drenched lineup of The Chiggers, which also included (inaudibly here) bass guitar support from Cliff of Skates & Rays.
Songwriting trivia: Walter E. "Jack" Rollins, the cowriter of "Frosty", was born and is buried in my home town of Keyser, West Virginia.
Personnel:
THE CHIGGERS
Nigel Cox ~ vocal
Patrick Morrisson ~ drums
Rex Broome ~ guitar
Lynnae Hitchcock ~ accordion
Clifford Ulrich ~ bass
"me getting incredibly embarrassed about the whole project. It just sounds awful to me right now, and I'm sort of scared to start singing again because I really don't like the way it's all turned out." Ah, shut up! First of all, you've put down 250+ damned songs, in less than a year: under such constraints, you've only done a small handful that are somewhat unlistenable...and most of those were on purpose. (The other 2-3 might be because I personally can't stand the song or something.) But more to the point: a LOT of these covers have brought out something interesting, cool, or surprising about the song, or just plain been good solid versions of the songs. Sure, sometimes they're roughly recorded or performed...but given the timeframe, why not just regard them as demos, as rough sketches of good ideas that can be turned (if you want) into some pretty fine, fully realized versions? Seriously, I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass: I would say there are at least 20 songs on here that are just plain really good covers. That's 20 more good songs in less than a year than a whole hell of a lot of people do.
ReplyDeleteStick with it, brother. You'll be a hell of a lot prouder you did, once the year finishes out.
ditto. you've done some great work and really put yourself out there. it's inspiring. keep on keepin' on!
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