32. "Didn't Wanna Do It" by Danny Collet

I used to be related through marriage to a helluva Cajun fiddle player, and that's how I came by these types of records. Great guy, fantastic musician... that's about the only thing I miss about that part of my life. But I'll not let this paragraph become the habitual place to bash the ex-boss, the ex-wife, etc.; there's work to be done.

Trouble is, I really really have no voice. So I'm handing the vocal duties on this one over to Anjali, the British-Indian Robot Lady who performed half of the Kingston Trio stage patter thing. I like Anjali. For one thing, she give me an excuse to do a "feat." song... I've been so jealous of modern pop stars whose singles always seem to feat. each other or T-Pain or whomever. So I'm going to feat. Anjali today.

Please also enjoy my first ever experiments with MIDI. Not in any way to be taken seriously, but a toe in the water, as it were. Gimme a break, I feel wretchedly ill!

Feeling as I do, the cover art is a total toss-off as well. I don't think Anjali really looks like that. But I spent too much time trying to find an CG image of an Indian girl (CG to reflect her robotic nature) and the internet sadly disappointed me. If anyone finds an appropriately cyber-looking image for Anjali, send it my way and it will become her canonical appearance forthwith. I love you guys.

Personnel:

Rex "Sickie Boy" Broome ~ Acoustic guitar

Anjali ~ vocals

Sax, Electric Guitar and Organ play themselves thanks to the Wonders of Modern Science

"Didn't Wanna Do It" performed by Danny Collet

"Didn't Wanna Do It" performed by Rex Broome feat. Anjali

31. "My Secret Flame" by The Mavericks

All my Mavericks records are rips from discs a former boss leant me. This guy was a real bastard, the beady-eyed aphasic kind, and he was a guitar collector with a special interest in Rickenbackers. I just can't get my head around that particular habit of the wealthy-- owning electric guitars that you don't use. It's easily excused if you used to use them and still have them, but to be currently pursuing the purchase of new guitars when you don't have any occasion to play them... it's just a bit creepy. Anyway, I often had me guitars with me at the job if I had a gig that evening, and the boss would always ask to see the Ricks. And he would always say, "Hey, Rex, you know, if you ever fall on hard times and need some money, I'll buy those from you." He got more and more intense about it right before he let me go. Just sayin'. I kept the records because I've heard the band is one of the more vital modern country artists and I figured I might one day want to check them out in more depth.

This is Day Three of me basically doing 39-40 from bed. I keep pulling up vocal-intensive songs and I have no voice. Drat the luck. Arrangement-wise I may have absorbed Sir Paul's faux reggae from yesterday as I went a little dubby on this one.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything.

"My Secret Flame" performed by The Mavericks

"My Secret Flame" performed by Rex Broome

29. "I Don't Know What to Do with My Life" by The Buzzcocks

They say necessity is a mother, and that certainly is true. I've come down with the cold that ruined Eden's second week of spring break (documented in the coughing fit on the playout of "Egg Man") and about halfway through this recording I just couldn't be in the studio (living room) any more and had to go to bed. But I also had to finish the track. Not having the strength nor wherewithal nor Brian Wilson mindset to reconstruct the recording rig in the bedroom, I brought the laptop and the headphones with me and recorded the vocal into-- and this was inevitably going to happen anyway-- the condensor mic on the MacBook. So, like, sorry about that.

They also say that timing is everything. My friend Jeff has demostrated that singing with a headcold aids one immensely in sounding like Jonathan Richman, so this comes a day too late. My voice being messed up cuts into my upper and lower registers, so of course I double tracked myself singing in both, leaving the outcome to the law of averages. The feel of the cover is a bit ill-considered: it sounds like I'm doing the same thing as I did to the Rancid tune, taking a punk-rock composition and rootsifying it, but that wasn't my intention. I just fell into that swing feel while working out the chords. I was actually hoping to capture the spark of the coolest Buzzcocks cover I ever heard, ages ago when my friend KT Wiegman came over to my house and belted out "You Say You Don't Love Me" on an acoustic, at if anything a faster tempo than the one on the record. 'Fraid I didn't come close to her performance, and now, as the NyQuil kicks in, I'm left to wonder where the hell KT is anyhow.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"I Don't Know What To Do With My Life" performed by The Buzzcocks

"I Don't Know What To Do With My Life" performed by Rex Broome

___________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

I've heard this recording a few times in my car over the past few months as I've reviewed the project, but until re-reading the text above I'd forgotten the circumstances involving my recording the guitars "properly" and the vocals upon my sickbed. Anyway, it seems to work fine and I don't have much to add in retrospect.

28. "She Cracked (Live)" by The Modern Lovers

Honestly, this really is one of my favorite songs ever. If you got a mix tape from me at any time during the first ten or so years that I made mix tapes, this song was on it. Go check if you don't believe me. This is the first song The Machine has picked for me to which I already knew all the words ("Egg Man" being probably the closest contender thus far). It's the best, better than "Road Runner" even.

I tried to honor the "Live" aspect of this track by playing it... well, live. And I also tried to capture a little bit of the spirit of my favorite Richman solo album, the one just called Jonathan Richman on which most of the tracks are performed just by the singer and his electric guitar (although mine turned out a little more harrowing than anything on that record). I also sang a few of the tweaked lyrics from this performance (and then undid that tribute by singing a few other lines the way I misheard them for years).

The "cover art cover" today is worth a note, in that it's the most effort I've put into the artwork and simultaneously the least noticeable... as fun as it was to put myself in front of Jerry Harrison and Ernie Brooks, you really can't easily tell it isn't still Richman. Lesson learned?

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"She Cracked (Live)" performed by The Modern Lovers

"She Cracked (Live)" performed by Rex Broome

_________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

This remains one of my favorites. The solo Rick 12 has a lot less tightly coiled tension than the slashing guitar and keys of the original, but it also has its own kind of stately uptight menace somehow. And I just like my vocal; it seems very Jonathan without sounding like the easy imitation of him it could have been.

At the time I wondered if I should change my spontaneous lyrical alteration "I-- stay alone-- eat CAT FOOD! AT HOME!" back to the original, if maybe it was too silly. But ultimately I'm glad I kept it. It feels in character for the guy narrating this version of the song, even if it might not've been quite right for Jojo's.

27. "I've Been Duped" by The Fall

Amazing. Not that The Machine has selected a song by The Fall for me to cover... in fact, I probably have tracks by The Fall than by any other artist in my library. I spent a recent year listening to nothing but The Fall, for reasons too... too something to detail. The weird part is that out of all those Fall tracks-- 1,372 of them-- I ended up with one of the very few that do not feature Mark E. Smith on lead vocals. This song is sung by MES's current wife Ele(a)n(i)(e)(a) (usually but hardly always "Eleni") Poulou.

First temptation was, naturally, to perform it as MES might. But cooler heads prevailed, and I ended up recording this as an homage to Ms. Poulou's penchant for low-tech synthesizers and modulators. Not a single digital loop used here... all of it comes out of one of the most primitive consumer-level keyboards imaginable, with just a few filters applied for interest and in emulation of Eleni.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"I've Been Duped" performed live by The Fall

"I've Been Duped" performed by Rex Broome

_______________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

I claimed on the analysis of "Egg Man" that it was probably as far as I could go with sequenced samples without knowing how to make real loops. I was wrong; this track takes it further. It just doesn't seem like it because I didn't have to wrestle with tempos.

All of the "drum" tracks were recorded right off of Gen's old Yamaha PSR-11 (see the sadly outdated Gear page) at the same preset tempo, and I simply cut between the different beats and added in fills as needed with surgical focus. The sequency-sounding bassline was constructed the same way, by micro-cutting between single bass notes I just plain played one at a time. There were no real loops nor a tempo grid or anything... it's all just cut end-to-end and synched manually.

Over that I played at least two live keyboard tracks in real time. One of them is insanely heavily treated with what, if I recall correctly, was one of the first effect filters I customized so dramatically that I saved it as a new preset, called "Eleni". It sounds cool and grimy on its own, but the best part of it was that if you were sustaining a not and then added another note on top of it, they made this kind of crackity splitting sound, like a bunch of pool balls colliding and repelling off of each other.

EASTER EGGS:

The kids were watching TV while I was recording the vocals to this one, and this of course being way back when my daily recording of crazy stuff still held some novelty for them. They were incredibly amused by my increasingly wacky delivery of the backing vocals on the chorus, so I played that up for their entertainment.

About halfway through it I did a few backing vocals which are intended to sound like Dalek voices. The kids had just started getting into Doctor Who at that point, so they found it very funny. It goes down in 39-40 history as, I believe, the third Who reference, and the second one in a row after "egging by TARDIS" in "Egg Man".

The cover art is part of a long standing ambition/joke I've had about releasing and album or an EP or something of my own entitled Frampton Comes Alive, with only the band's name added to the original artwork. Eventually I decided that it would also be a funny thing for The Fall to do, during a period where I was actively submitting fake Fall album titles, track listings and cover artwork to a thread dedicated to such things on the Fall Online Forum. So that cover art was already, bizarrely, lying around on my hard drive. Hey, it's me.

26. "Egg Man" by The Beastie Boys

I reckon this one's a classic for just about anyone my age. I don't think I know anyone who actively dislikes the Beasties, except for those harboring a pathological disdain for hip hop (which is probably its own punishment). I was excited to see this one pop up on The Machine because I knew offhand that I had a good deal of the source material sampled on it-- the Mayfield, the PE, the film scores-- but it got even better when I discovered that I had a killer cheesy synthstrumental cover of "Superfly" by Synthesonic Sounds, of which I made liberal use.

The artist for this installment of 39-40 is Braine, a group which has theoretically existed for a nine months or so now since the name was made up by Eden and her guitar teacher Dan West: it was to be a power trio consisting of all my daughters and named after a combination of their last names, Broome and Hain. Eden's already writes songs for and fronts the band Wye, and Miranda is coming along nicely as a bassist and cellist, but the lack of a drum set has prevented Ridley from rounding out the lineup. Nonetheless they all appear on lead vocals here, so I'm calling it the band's debut.

Personnel:

Eden Hain ~ MCA (and additional engineering)

Miranda Broome ~ The King Ad Rock

Ridley Broome ~ Mike D

Rex Broome ~ Musical assemblage and the rest of it

"Egg Man" performed by Beastie Boys

"Egg Man" performed by Braine

_______________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

By some reckonings the first true "classic" of 39-40, and I definitely can understand why. The things that grabbed the most attention in the early months of the project were (1) recognizable songs, which were rare at the time since the originals were being randomly selected from my vast-ass library, and (2) contributions by the kids, both for the adorability factor and then, increasingly, because they did stuff they probably shouldn't be able to do. Having them do a basically fun, prankster-y kind of rap was a natural.

Here I took the collage process about as far as I could without learning how to make real loops. And it was damned hard. I was running the Garageband loops that make up about 50% of the backing track at the approximate speed of the fake version of "Superfly" that was the source of my primary groove. It wasn't an exact fit so I had to do lots of trimming as I went along. From there on it was a slice and dice fiesta with me hacking up bits of the Psycho theme (which I'd captured from video years earlier as a soundbite for a Halloween compilation), the Jaws theme, Public Enemy, and, ultimately, the kids' vocals. This early in the game they hadn't quite dialed in how to keep up with the beat, so the vocals were done line by line and then required a lot of editing to get to the form you hear on the track. They would get much better at this, and the older the kid, the easier it was, for natural reasons.

The bottom line was that it was a long, long process that would've taken a lot less time once I learned how to create loops, but the editing basically worked out. What isn't so hot on the final product is the mixing, which is all the hell over the place. I wish I still had the session tracks for this one, because I could fix it up a lot now, but it's gone with the wind and this will have to do. A lot of people enjoyed it, so I don't worry about it any more than I have to.

EASTER EGGS (no pun intended):

In addition to the samples mentioned above, most of which are either the same sources used on the original or covers thereof, I rather obviously incorporated bits of "I Am the Walrus" by The Beatles and "The Little Black Egg" by The Nightcrawlers. "The Little Black Egg" would later be covered in its entirety on 39-40 with Miranda doing most of the heavy lifting, whereas big chunks of "Walrus" would be used in the Frankensteinian creation of this monstrosity.

The lounge-synth version of "Superfly" that I used in place of the real one is by Synthesonic Sounds, and it is dope.

Perhaps oddly, I didn't use any samples from the original Beasties version of "Egg Man" at all.

Most of the lyrics are intact with only a few shifts... "the eggs did crack on Andy's back" refers to the lead guitarist in Eden's band at the time, and then Eden raps "My name's Eden and I throw the yolk" where it useta say "Yauch". Her coughing fit at the end was a real coughing fit.

In my vocal turn as the actual Egg Man, I throw in a few references, one to Tony Perkins (as the Psycho music plays on the track), one boast about "egging by TARDIS like Doctor Who", and a claim to have "buried Paul" vaguely inspired by the "Walrus" samples. At the time, Eden and I were really into a weird entry in the 365 Project gleaned from a tape of a '70s radio show melodramatically detailing the "Paul is dead" conspiracy... we just found it endlessly amusing.

25. "Hips and Abdomen" by Cathi Stout

The battle between irony and sincerity continues unabated.

The problem in choosing a side is that both ethics are correct at times. Sincerity has the virtue of being pure and heartfelt, but there are things which are clearly bunkass, and being sincere about such things is worthy of ironic derision. On the other hand, irony as a kneejerk response to everything is just plain reprehensible. And the war rages without so much as a ceasefire.

All of this is by way of saying that it can be very confusing to enjoy "outsider music" as much as I do. That's largely because the term is slippery and best, and the people who collect and present this kind of stuff (curators, I suppose) have any number of agendas. All of us are interested in recordings and compositions outside of the mainstream and all but forgotten. Some of us are scholarly, some of us semi-professional nostalgists, and some are doubtless just looking for laughs at the expense of the people guileless enough to commit their odd, odd selves to tape (or similar). For me, the rewards come when I can be both amazed by the sheer weirdness of a piece and yet still emotionally relate to the impulses and desires behind its creation, and be moved in a profound way. It's a thrilling feeling and it does my favorite thing, almost, of all: challenges my ideas of what songs and recordings can be, what kind of things can touch us. Of course, sometimes I snicker, too. And don't feel great about it afterward. But the rewards are many.

Anyway, what we have here is an excerpt from... well, a 1970's Gospel excercise record. It may well have been put forward with a slightly condescending smirk, but at the same time, it's a sound whose like might never have been heard again and it has some anthropological interest. I decided to play it... sincere. Ignoring the exercise bit, I focused on the sort of cut-rate Oak Ridge Boys-style backing track, which is apparently pretty obscure-- can't find any references to it online anyhow-- and tried to perform it in a style that seemed to me more visceral. Which it certainly really isn't, and perhaps ironic derision is the proper response to my take on it. And the fighting goes on.

Final note on the oddity of this process: my recording seems to be of a song called something like "By Faith" or "Step Out Upon the Water", but because of the source from which I pulled it, its title remains, amazingly, "Hips and Abdomen".

Personnel:

Rex ~ guitar and vocal

Photo by Eden Hain

"Hips & Abdomen" performed by Cathi Stout

"Hips & Abdomen" performed by Rex Broome

___________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

I pretty much stand by my decision to interpret this piece as I did. The above ruminations on sincerity, irony and Outsider Art stand, and I have nothing of consequence to add.

The recording is okay, although the performance gets shakier as it goes on. At this point I hadn't worked out how to record parallel tracks in Garageband, so this, as with all tracks where I sang and played guitar at the same time, was recorded in Audacity, and like most of them the tracks weren't treated with any effects, so it's very dry. Which is okay, but somehow I messed up let the vocal drift into the red throughout the track. It could be worse, but it bugs me a lot more now than it did at the time.

As I still felt a little self-conscious about doing a completely live performance and, more to the point, tended to feel like I was unlikely to get another good take after I'd come close, I left some obvious mistakes in this recording, the most obvious part being when I say that the apostle Peter "died" instead of "cried". It creates a bit of a continuity problem in the song, to say nothing of the Scriptures.

EASTER EGGS:

Very obviously I segue into "Lookin' Out My Back Door" by Creedence Clearwater Revival on the playout. That song is deep in my musical DNA as it was one of a very small handful of 45s I inherited from parts unknown as a very young child (along with The Band's "Up On Cripple Creek", a pair of Beatles singles, and "Ode to Billy Joe"). For some reason I sing "lookin' out my front door", though. If there was meant to be any significance to that, I've totally forgotten what it might've been.

24. "Solar System" by The Beach Boys

So in all honesty, this was the first time I took a look/listen at what The Machine selected for me and went all "Dude, I don't know if I can DO this." It's a Brian Wilson thing. It's got weird chords and changes, and good singing and stuff. I was afraid it might take me more than a day to even unravel the music part. I thought of a few weird ways of doing it, as usual, and then wound up with... this.

A few notes: the background space noises are from a record called "Scary Sounds: Nightmarish Noise for Halloween!" I sort of collect that kind of thing, but it should be noted that I might well have to cover this track itself ("Saucer Wars in Outer Space") one day. Also, I reversed the track to give myself something else to stir into the sonic stew, and ended up accidentally making the sped-up backwards "alien voices" play forward again... you can hear them on the fade-out.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ everything

"Solar System" performed by The Beach Boys

"Solar System" performed by Rex Broome

_________________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

Not very pleasant to listen to, really. The effects on the vocals were just too much. At the time I think I was just trying to cover up for pitch problems on those really hard-t0-sing even the melody lines (I didn't even dare to try the harmonies), but it ends up too garbles to qualify as "whimsical", which had been my hope. I do enjoy the weird little keyboard vibe things that stand in for the entire backing track, but overall it was mostly an attempt to "show my work" in the face of a solution that didn't really work out.

This one was most definitely tracked along to the original song, which was then erased. Without doing so, I think I would have been totally lost on those melodies and quite probably the keyboard parts to. Never even considered playing any guitar on this one.

By far the best part of this is the parody artwork, which wasn't really so much difficult-- it's a grid with all the elements I needed already there in little squares to be duplicated and pasted-- as it was time-consuming. Very effective, though!

EASTER EGGS:

There's a backwards vocal of me singing... something... running through the latter part of the track. I honestly don't remember what that was and don't feel like reversing it to find out, because I highly suspect it's just the same vocal as the lead track, just played backward and with far fewer effects.

23. "I Can't Pretend" by The Barracudas

A lot of people spend a lot of time debating what is and isn't power pop. There's only one thing I'm sure of: if a song has a tight little boogie-sounding bit and then breaks into giant folk chords on the chorus and then goes back again, giving one the impression of listening to Chuck Berry turning into the Byrds and back three times in as many minutes, it's power pop.

Elsewhere, damn am I getting sick of drum loops. I thought about doing this one a little differently, but the truth is, it's so close to what I do with Skates & Rays that I thought I ought to do it "correctly" to make a point, and then when The Machine gives me something by Teenage Fanclub I'll record that one on a toy xylophone played backwards and re-recorded off of a cellphone speaker in my shower. Okay, sorted.

Oh, and a prize to anyone who identifies whose vocal style I'm aping on the word "obsession".

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"I Can't Pretend" performed by The Barracudas

"I Can't Pretend" performed by Rex Broome

_____________________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

This seems to me to have been the first time I went all-out to use GarageBand to simulate a real live rock and roll band. When I conceived of 39-40, I'd thought that I'd probably be getting weekly live band performances from Skates & Rays rehearsals, but by this point it had turned out that the band was doing very little due to scheduling issues, so I felt I needed to establish my credentials at what I did "best".

As I recall, it wasn't that hard, but it took a long time, and I was very pleased with the results at the time. In retropect, the drums sound pretty weedy... those are all drum loops that came packaged with Garageband because I hadn't figured out how to make my own drum loops yet, nor had I spent much time working out compression and effect treatments to unify loops from different sources. Still, it's not bad.

EASTER EGGS:

The vocalist I'm ripping off on the "it's an obsession with you" line mentioned in the challenge above is, of course, Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs. It still sounds screamingly obvious to me, but I like it.

22. "Alive Again" by Live Skull

If asked to cite one truly great band who's almost completely forgotten, I might well point to Live Skull. Thanks to a rave in Spin, I picked up Live Skull's Dusted at a tender age, having only read about Sonic Youth and the like, and still harboring suspicions that this whole "punk rock" thing might just be an attention-grabbing put-on. I've still never heard anything quite like it, although at this point I can make connections with all kinds of influences; it still hovers around my personal top 10 records when such things are called for. Thalia Zedek's subsequent band Come got a little more notice and sound positively prescient post-Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I still prefer the textural guitar tangle of Live Skull.

This song is one of the bonus tracks on the out-of-print CD... it still isn't "on" the album as my mind hears it, because I listened to the thing on cassette so many millions of times. And it's not the greatest showcase of the band, sounding a little more like Patti Smith-meets-Shriekback (NTTAWWT) than the usual controlled sludge-feast. That was a relief for me, because the guitar parts on most LS songs would be damned hard to master in 24 hours, if ever. And to entertain myself alone, I recite my best approximation of Zedek's poetry from the original track stereo left, and something I wrote myself stereo right. Because like the judge said, it's all about me.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ everything except:

Eden Hain ~ viola

"Alive Again" performed by Live Skull

"Alive Again" performed by Rex Broome

_____________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

This isn't the kind of thing most people would want to listen to more than once, if they're even able to get all the way through it... after all, the original is only a bonus track on a difficult art-guitar record nobody's ever heard, and my cover is very true to the atonal, sensory-overload spirit of the thing. But I like the way I got my two overdubbed guitars to seem to "interact" with each other, and the stereo poems are just like on the original. Except that stereo right track, which is the poem that I wrote for the recording, and it's not too bad... which is a good thing, because Thalia Zedek's poem on the left channel is way better than most poems intoned over arty rock music.

My enjoyment of it is a little bit dulled by the fact that I'd go on to do too many other things like it on 39-40... confusing overlapping vocals, slashy noodling guitars, no real focus. But it was a legitimate treatment of this particular piece, I think.

EASTER EGGS:

Surprisingly my original poem seems to be devoid of clever references to anything.

However, interjected into Zedek's poem is the question "Does the home secretary have the barest faintest inkling of what's going down?" or some misquote thereof; it's line from The Fall's "Telephone Thing".

"The cat's going nuts" at the end is a description of what was happening in the room as I finished recording the vocal.

21. "The Legendary Morris Windsor" by Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3

Strategy #2 for when The Machine assigns me to cover stage patter: make it into a song. I had this funny little riff thing I made up while troubleshooting the Twin yesterday, and, fortunately, some entertaining verbal riffing by Hitchcock and Scott McCaughey (from a Venus 3 gig at Maxwell's in November of 2006) with which to work, so it could've been worse.

I'm... not entirely sure I really have a Strategy #3 worked out.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"The Legendary Morris Windsor" performed by Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3

"The Legendary Morris Windsor" performed by Rex Broome

________________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

Wow, that's a short writeup, considering that I basically wrote an entirely new song for this track! Not much of a song, but it does sound plausible as one of the more lighthearted early Soft Boys tunes... sort of...

I count this as a pretty solid success. The music part didn't take too long to construct... I had the riff and that little intro thing which served as the "Maxwell's" refrain, and I think I pretty much made up the two bridges on the spot (I don't think they're even the same as each other), then played the bass to match and edited the drums accordingly.

I guess it's a trifle in a way, but what else is to be done with a randomly selected track like this one once you've already had female Indian robots in the middle of the ocean recreate stage patter? Well, there are a few more strategies left, but this one is about as good as it would get. I kinda wish there had been more tracks like this, but after I stopped using the randomizer halfway through the project, it became unlikely that this kind of non-musical and for all intents and purposes not-intended-as-art track would become source material.

My favorite part, really, is the strained and seemingly impassioned backing vocals on the bits that are clearly just someone thinking out loud... "It might've been '86!"

EASTER EGGS:

The text is almost verbatim what Robyn and Scott (and Morris) say on the original with only very occasional alterations to fit the meter or make transitions.

"Oh no no no" is a lift from The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville".

"Tell me, Morris" on the fadeout is from Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians' "Tell Me About Your Drugs". Morris is the band's drummer, but the band have all swapped instruments on that track and Morris is on guitar. Robyn yells, "Tell me, Morris!" right before the guitar solo.

20. "Kill the Mockingbird" by House of Freaks

House of Freaks is probably, sadly best known these days for the tragic death of its frontman Brian Harvey, and for being well ahead of its time in featuring the kind of minimalist lineup (just one guitar and drums) that wouldn't be embraced until much later in the post-White Stripes world. They also had some cross-pollination with Cracker and played with Sparklehorse, whose Mark Linkous has also just passed away too soon. Me, I really like Harvey's voice. It's a clear insistent folk-rock tenor, similar in some ways to the underrated Ed Crawford of fIREHOSE, emotive without putting on any kind of forced false grit. It may well come from having been raised on The Kingston Trio, but if I could choose what kind of singing voice I had, I'd pick something very much like Harvey's.

My version went for a sort of (more) noir feeling... I can really get into the vibrato sound of my Fender Twin. The wobbly timing issue sort of compounded themselves over the recording of the track... sorry about that. I do these things rather quickly, you know.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"Kill the Mockingbird" performed by House of Freaks

"Kill the Mockingbird" performed by Rex Broome

______________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

Categorizing this one is a little bit tough... I guess I'd classify it as "Big Production Number (Non-Fake-Rock-Band Division)". I hadn't thought about it much before now, but that's a useful description to have lying around.

Although I do still hear the timing issues alluded to in the blog entry at the time, I'm much more bothered by the inconsistency of the mix. At least I was when listening to it on my car stereo recently... the balance sounds a little better on the tinny speakers of my MacBook. Of course, one of the big challenges with mixing in general is getting the recording to sound as good as possible on as many different sound reproduction devices or situations as you can. This requires a bit of time to be spent trying the mixes out on various sound systems, but over the course of 39-40 I rarely had time to do that. Usually I'd do the mix with headphones, then listen to it on the MacBook speakers, figuring that those were the extremes: super high detail and bass clarity in the phones, crappy everything on the computer speakers. But sometimes things just turn out differently when they come out from blown speakers, or even working ones in your car. There are a few latter day 39-40 songs I may even remix, particularly the ones that seem to me as if they might be quite good indeed if not for the mix, but the mix session for this song was lost along with all the others through September or so of 2010 in the Great Hard Drive Crash.

19. "St. Mary" by Rancid

Looks like all the inevitable curveballs of this process are happening right up front. Here, for the first time, is a song by an artist whom I don't like very much at all. Funny how one man's pargaon of punk-rock integrity is another man's quintessential poseur posse, seeming to endlessly rip off The Clash without bringing anything new to the table. This record is lurking in my library on the off-chance that someone I respect tells me to give the band a serious try.

But the aim of 39-40 isn't to bash artists, it's to take each song offered up by The Machine on its own merits and try to come up with a response to it or interpretation of it that furthers or redefines its intent. What we have here is a song-story with guns and love and revenge... maybe I will like it better if I turn it into straight country. Worth a shot anyway.

(It's times like this that I wish I had some nearby friends who were like ace country pickers and I could just call them up and say, "Hey, you busy? Wanna drop by and throw some pedal steel on this thing?" But alas.)

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Vocal & guitar

"St. Mary" performed by Rancid

"St. Mary" performed by Rex Broome

______________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

This is another one of those early vocals that sounds way better than I remember, and way better than most of them that I've done lately. That's more than a little frustrating.

I'm a little surprised that I added a harmonica but not a high harmony to this one. Most likely I was going for a true Guthrie-style solo artist feel, although I'm not entirely sure whether or not I cut the guitar and vocal separately or at the same time.

Most 39-40 songs fall into one of maybe six trope categories. Faux-Folk Balladeer is one of the big ones, and this is probably the third one I'd done at this point, after "To Beat the Devil" and, perhaps oddly, "So Let's Get Truth".

EASTER EGGS:

The added phrase "Smoky Mountain rain" is a shout-out of sorts to the Ronnie Milsap song by that title, which I actually do like in a not-very-ironic way.

18. "How I (Learned My Lesson) (Live)" by X

I love X so much that I actually have a pet named after one of its members. Now, that may or may not have something to do with the fact that she's a white female cat and my daughter, about 3 at the time we got the cat, like to proclaim very loudly that she wanted a WHITE GIRL cat, but in the end, I have to take responsibility for naming the creature Exene. Which would become even more embarrassing a year or so later when I started dating a woman who knew all of the members of X pretty well, and had for a long time. She married me anyway and now gets really irritated when Exene pees on the couch, not giving the name a second thought.

This was... difficult. Some hairpin turns, sudden changes not where you'd think they are... actually a small universe of inventive musical decisions for a punk rock tune. It's X. Anyway, I wanted to play this on ukulele at first, but it was too hard to get the chord forms up the neck formed by my fingers, so it migrated back to guitar. I needed some kind of percussion to lock in those jerky changes so they didn't sound like mistakes... hence the tambourine. And then... the vocals. It took two of me to (start to) equal one Exene, and then there was Doe's part. I love X. But this was hard.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"How I (Learned My Lesson) (Live)" performed by X

"How I (Learned My Lesson)" performed by Rex Broome

_________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

Not much to add to this one, other than that the memory of how tough it was to get down really prevents me from having an opinion as to whether or not it's good. This was another one where I literally played along with the original song when recording the guitar part. At the time I think that it was necessary to do so given the complexity of the music. After doing this for a year, I think, but couldn't swear, that I could play this one unaided now. Not saying it would be easy or anything, just that I could do it. Maybe.

17: "Intro To: Where Have All the Flowers Gone" by The Kingston Trio

This was bound to happen. Note that what The Machine has selected for me here is not "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" as performed by The Kingston Trio, but the spoken intro to a live performance of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" from the K3's 1967 concert album Once Upon a Time. An odd thing to cover, but there you are.

Fortunately I had prepared for this eventuality. I have a number of strategies for dealing with such tracks, and here's the first one.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Assemblage and banjo what needs restringing

"Intro To: Where Have All the Flowers Gone" performed by The Kingtson Trio

"Intro To: Where Have All the Flowers Gone" performed by Rex Broome

___________________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

The first, uncredited appearance of Anjali, who would continue to unwittingly contribute to 39-40 until the bitter end. Here, for some reason, I seem to have use her to portray both John Stewart and Bob Shane. Which would have been fine (not great, but at least comprehensible) had I panned them to specific places in the stereo picture, instead of setting both instances of her voice to the "wandering around" effects setting.

I actually think I know why I used two Anjalis, although I can't recall whether it was conscious or not: around the time I recorded this one, my wife Gen had just gotten a pair of new co-workers of Indian descent, both named Pooja. This seemed so unlikely to me that I must surely have intended the double Anjalis to reflect the double Pooja presence in our family life. I can't go much further with that line of thinking, though.

EASTER EGGS:

I was surprised and a little bit disappointed with myself to realize, upon listening back to this track, that I'd used the sound effect of the lonesome buoy from the end of the opening scene of Jaws here, well before its more appropriate appearance on this track. I'll go into more detail about the sound on that entry, but the fact that I unknowingly used the same ambient effect twice really makes me wonder about just how limited my imagination is.

Finally, I have no idea why the text in this section is showing up in an unbroken glob like it is. Believe me, I would stop it if I could.

16. "Tic-Tac-Toe" by Booker T & the MG's

Instant karma had gotten me. After carping about the difficulty of replicating a 12-bar blues instrumental two days ago, The Machine a choisi pour moi: a 12-bar blues instrumental! The thing here is that the real sparks on these kind of pieces fly in the interaction of the musicians, who in the case of the original recording are phenomenal; most days on 39-40, I'm just me, interacting with myself in the form of a recorded ghost. The interest has to come from elsewhere. So why not... add some lyrics?

What I did was, I took the not-Japanese lyrics from yesterday's track, fed them into a translation engine to make them, for the first time, actually Japanese, and then translated them back into English, and that's what I sang, in one take, devolving over time into an uncharacteristic growl which I certainly didn't dislike. One has to wonder to whom these words "belong" as intellectual property at this point. Kazutoshi Sakurai of Mr. Children certainly never actually wrote them, but neither, in any meaningful sense, did I. I have a little more authorship this time around because I did choose to double-translate them, but still little to no control over what came out. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey!

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"Tic-Tac-Toe" performed by Booker T & the MG's

"Tic-Tac-Toe" performed by Rex Broome

_________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

Continuing more or less on from yesterday's notes, I thought this entry to be, at the time, rather badass. The complete lack of comments or feedback seem to indicate that I may have been overenthusiastic.

The conceptual-novelty hook didn't take, and that's fine. In the process I discovered a really dug-in rock vocal style I had never truly thought I had in me, and you can literally hear it come to life over the course of the performance. I won't argue that it's brilliant, but it was new to me and I wish I'd stumbled upon it sooner in my life.

EASTER EGGS:

Around the 3rd instrumental break, the guitar line is lifted from "Seven Chinese Brothers" by R.E.M. This is more or less accidental. What I did before I recorded the vocal was to set the "rhythm section" parts in motion, and then improvise over them for the duration on guitar (my putative primary instrument) and keyboard (on which I suck). On the guitar track, I must've gotten bored at some point and thrown the R.E.M. riff in there. After I printed the vocal, I went back and tried to drop the lead instruments in and out as if they'd been taking agreed-upon solo spots. By dumb luck, that wound up leaving the ripped-off riff center stage for that segment.

15. "So Let's Get Truth" by Mr. Children

There's a long story as to how Mr. Children, apparently a very popular and somewhat U2-ish Japanese rock band who happen to have the best band name of all time, better even than Paraffin Jack Flash Ltd., came to my attention and ultimately to being selected by The Machine for me to cover today. It starts with myself and several friends having rented a private karaoke booth for lulz, only to be confronted by book after book of song lists in Japanese and Korean, and me leafing through the Asian books picking out fragments of English to see if I could recognize anything. I managed to find the title of a song I not only recognized but also loved: "Tomorrow Never Knows", which turned out not the be the Beatles song but a totally different tune by, yes, Mr. Children, which was instant love for me. The kicker was that, as the "Tomorrow Never Knows" on Revolver is basically a two chord vamp, I was even able to sing John Lennon's melody over the karaoke track to the Mr. Children song (a sizeable hit in Japan).

I must've found this story amusing enough to relate it to my bandmates, and some months later our bass player Cliff gave me this Mr. Children album (深海) as a Christmas gift. I love my band.

I didn't feel like I could just phonetically reproduce the lyrics on this like I did with the Bjork piece last week; the Icelandic on that one seemed part and parcel with the otherworldly a capella sound (and yes, there is surely a special place in hell for me for such cultural reductionism), whereas this song was a sort of folk-songy lyric-driven thing. And there's no translation available.

So I hit on the sort of novelty approach of not so much transliterating it as pretending that it's English to begin with and that I had to figure out what the words are, as if it were a My Bloody Valentine or early R.E.M. tune. And by the time I got to the lines "The humans beat up the showboat / The gecko TV blues" I noticed that I seemed to be producing a completely normal Beck song. Weird. I really like how it turned out. It's funny, but in a cool way... I hope Mr. Children might approve.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything, including his recorded debut on harmonica, which is poor

Transliteration (or whatever; there must be a name for this process) assistance ~ Eden Hain

"So Let's Get Truth" performed by Mr. Children

"So Let's Get Truth" performed by Rex Broome

_______________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

I still really like this one, and it may be the point at which I realized that 39-40 could become something special beyond its original insane parameters. I don't think it ever did, because to have truly done so I think it would've needed to accrue a larger audience than it ever did. In my mind, the enterprise of this track was interesting enough, and the results sufficiently competent and entertaining, to be one of those things that friends might forward around to each other or share on Facebook or whatever, and that might've led-- or so I narcissistically imagined-- to an actual following of people who hadn't previously known me following the nuttiness of the attempt. Didn't happen: the average 39-40 page was viewed by about 12 people, and anecdotal evidence suggests the vast majority of them knew me for some other reason. But there was, briefly, The Dream.

The reason I thought that it might fly with this particular track was The Novelty Factor. It seems to me that most online music (by which I mean basically stuff you hear about by online word-of-mouth as opposed to regular media or "professional" reviews and critics) depends more consistently on humor and satire or at least unbelievable weirdness to gain social traction, and does even better if there's a "story" to how the song got that way. I've tended to shy away from even the appearance of "novelty" in my musical work, particularly in my own songwriting and especially in the "official" stuff like the Skates & Rays LP, even though I know I can do it fairly well... it just feels like cheating for some reason. But in the context of 39-40, where each song is by nature somewhat disposible, it seemed a little bit inevitable if I was going to keep the approach fresh and varied from day to day, and this seemed to be a pretty easy gimmick to accept since there was at least a chance that the end result could be interesting out of context-- and I think it is. To me, at least, it radiates a joy in language and avoids any kind of Engrishy cultural condescension. My conscience is pretty clean on that last point because Eden and I did the transliteration very scrupulously... we could've stuck jokes in there or chosen to go with funnier substitute words when we couldn't quite land on an English equivalent, but we didn't.

Beyond which, the track as I played it and sang it came out way better than I expected. The harmonica is not as bad as I judged it at the time, and listening to it now, my singing is way better than I'd thought it was (as opposed to much later in 39-40, where my singing is far worse than it has any right to be). Overall, I guess I just hope-- and this is kind of one of my overriding ambitions for many of these tunes, as perverse as it may be-- that this would be a thought-provoking recording to discover out of context in the distant future, and not one that you'd mind hearing again whilst trying to figure out just W, precisely, TF.

14. "Blue 'n' Groovy" by Paraffin Jack Flash Ltd.

I'm going to generously classify this one as a "noble failure"

It seemed fortuitous that The Machine pulled up an instrumental track for me on the day I was taking the kids to Disneyland. Particularly a track that was all style and little substance. Not that this recording is bad... it features many of the earmarks of the great Space Age Pop sound which I was so elated to (re-)discover in the '90s for the weirdness it had truly been: exotica percussion, dementedly fuzzed-out jazz guitar, Tijuana Brass horns and tasty organ tones, and the group's name kills it with fire. But formalistically it's a 12-bar blues, and I don't think I need to reinterpret that trope, at least when there are no lyrics to mangle and I can't play horn charts. That located us squarely back in audio pastiche territory.

It seemed natural (to me, at least) to work the Disneyland trip into the process of the recording. The kids and I used cellphones to ask random park visitors to respond to the title phrase of the song. This produced some interesting results, one of which was the realization that while most people at Disneyland won't totally ignore crazy-seeming requests by a guy and three kids, they aren't as uninhibited as you might expect. Another thing we say firsthand was the weirdness of cultural reduction over time: the word "groovy" evoked the '60s, '70's and the '80s, depending on who you asked, and an overwhelming number of interviewees (well, 3 out of 4 direct citations) associated it directly with Scooby Doo. Didn't see that one coming.

But when we got the recordings home, they just plain weren't that good. I'd sort of expected the cheapo method of sound gathering to have its own post-digital Alam Lomax-y charm, but honestly, no matter how I converted it or re-recorded it, it just sound shrill and lousy. Struggling through that problem, I further screwed myself by trying to overlay 4/4 dance beats on a 6/8 swing rhythm. I've heard it done on many a Ninja Tune compilation and figured I could handle it. Sorry about that. Again I tried to manufacture some charm out of the ramshackle nature of the process, then kicked it in the head, tried to patch it up with some of my own guitar and bass, and called it a night, with some lessons learned. The End.

"Blue 'n' Groovy" performed by Paraffin Jack Flash Ltd.

"Blue 'n' Groovy" performed by Rex Broome and The Random Disneyland Visitors

______________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

"Noble failure" is probably too kind. It's tough listening no matter how foregivingly you approach it. Most of what is said about is true, though: almost everything that could've made the interview segments comprehensible above the music bed was tried, to no avail. At that point the whole concept should've been ditched, but it remains tough to do that, even at the end of the project. The tempo and time-signature matching problems, those I would learn to handle or avoid a dozen different ways.

I guess the lasting import of this experiment was that one of the quickie ways I'd envisioned to dash off a song on a busy day was to just plain sing it into a cell phone and upload it later, but this debacle sort of closed that avenue, the only subsequent recording I can recall which dealt with cell phones in any way being this one. Without a doubt I could have figured out how to directly send phone messages and recordings directly to my hard drive and use them; God knows I mastered more obscure and complex technologies than that over the course of 39-40, and I think the fact that I never did so has more to do with my antipathy toward cell phones themselves.

Okay, antipathy hell... I really don't like cell phones much. I describe myself as a medium-tech individual, but it's really more like I'm selective-tech. Wireless internet access is pretty essential to my life these days, and I'm fairly sophisticated in my understanding of most digital technologies about which I give a shit (whilst also being a bit of an admitted fetishist for antiquated tech as well). But I was never a phone person to begin with, and my early experience with cell phones coincided with the collapse of my first marriage and the lonely grisly aftermath. So all I remember were endless, unwanted conversations with the ex which were basically unending vilifications of my person to be endured in the vain hope of getting some time with my kids, depressing conversations with divorce lawyers, then bankruptcy lawyers, then creditors, and relaying horrible news to my parents and having to beg for assistance, that kind of phone life, sprinkled with the occasional chats with women I was dating or hoping to date, largely centered on trying to act like none of the above was happening and I was a normal human being intimacy with whom should not terrify them. So, cell phones, while I appreciate that none of this is your fault, still, go to hell because I hate you and always will. So there.