94. "Cry Like a Baby" by Kasey Chambers

Second in the series of "quickies" done before turning the laptop in. In all honesty, the fasted way to get a cover accomplished is obviously as an acoustic strum and sing number, but it's not just playing and singing the thing straight through. That gets better results but typically takes at least five takes before I settle into the tune and play it all the way through without any major mistakes. It's much easier to play the guitar in one take, and then record the vocal in one take. It doesn't necessarily always sound inspired, but in a pinch it gets the job done.

Even then, it's a bit difficult to get myself to leave it alone, but sometimes you just have to.

Personnel: Rex

"Cry Like a Baby" performed by Kasey Chambers

"Cry Like a Baby" performed by Rex Broome

93. "Leaves Me Cold" by Lush

My MacBook is approaching being three years old and Applecare is about to run out. In particular the battery's dead and it seemed prudent to take it in for one last workup. I had no way of knowing how long it would be away, so I set out to do some quick and dirty covers to tide 39-40 over in the interrim, so I wouldn't have to start from ground zero setting up my wife's machine for recording. This is the first one.

Lush was my first love among what are now unfortunately almost always known as the "shoegazer" bands; the video for "De-Luxe" on 120 Minutes struck me as powerfully unlike anything I'd ever heard before (and indeed I was at the time ignorant of most of their sound's clearer antecedents). Like most of their contemporaries, they'd fall on hard times as they attempted to grow beyond their original sound, but I maintain a certain emotional attachment to them. Miki Berenyi was one of my first and few musical "crushes": most of the female songwriters and musicians I really admire and love don't seem actually physically attractive to me for some reason-- something about what they do puts them more in the "sister" category for me, whereas actresses and comediennes feel like fair fantasy game-- but Miki did and does, and I remain saddened by the way she seemingly walked away from music after Lush ended in tragedy.

One thing I learned while hunting for artwork: Lush did a cover of "Outdoor Miner" as b-side? How did I miss that for 20 years?

Personnel: Rex

"Leaves Me Cold" performed by Lush

"Leaves Me Cold" performed by Rex Broome

92. "El Dorado 1997" by Manu Chao

Okay, there are a few unfortunate whack circumstances affecting how this one turned out. The idea was that after a totally live, in-front-of-an-audience, have-to-dress-up-for-it kind of recording, I'd do one that was totally devoid of "real" elements except for my voice.

But after I'd programmed pretty much all of the music, something happened to the session that eradicated it, and I had to do it all again real fast. That is why the music sounds rubbish.

The other thing is the words. The lyrics are apparently in a weird hybrid of Portuguese and Spanish. Nobody in the real world within the sound of my voice was able to clarify them for me, so I did a bunch of translations from both Spanish and Portuguese to English, hoping I could cobble some new approximation of the sense of the thing together. Let me tell you, that sort of thing just doesn't work. What I got was that some kind of police action was carried out against a particular group of rural Brazilians (rendered "rednecks" by one search engine and "bass" by another; Wikipedia clarified who these folks were) resulting in a casualty that sends some kind of political shockwaves through the greater world. Another word was variously defined as "talk" or "phallus", and the nonsensical word "pizza" stubbornly refused to change to anything reasonable in any rendition. Not enough to really work with, so instead I sang all four translations as a sort of pidgin round or something. That is why the words don't make any sense.

I'm sure someone can elucidate the meaning of the song for me, but nobody could in the finite time allowed to me to finish the tune, and at some point you have to stop doing research and actually start recording something, so I did. And then it got erased, which brings us back to do re mi...

Personnel: Rex

"El Dorado 1997" performed by Manu Chao

"El Dorado 1997" performed by Rex Broome

91. "Sloop John B (Live)" by Thunderhill

Yep, it's a real live track. I'm on the original, too, playing bass with my dad in the latter day Thunderhill, around 1990 at the Honi Honi in Deep Creek. I've played bass and sang harmonies on this song many, many times. So of course on my cover I had the ever-dependable Clifford Ulrich of Skates & Rays play the bass and sing the harmonies.

I'd be the first to admit that this sounds suspicious. My first live show since starting 39-40 was approaching, and I thought it would be ridiculous not to do a cover selected by The Machine as part of the set, and post a live recording of it. And the cover that was picked for me was a song I already knew by heart, which has rarely happened to this point. But it's true.

The recording of my version took place at the Atwater Village Centennial Street Fair. The sound is even dicier than usual because it's lifted from a video of the show, which is oddly also true of the Thunderhill original. So you get two lo-fi live recordings today. I hope to be doing more covers at live shows over the course of the project, so consider this a trial run. Cliff and I had never performed the song together before, so treat it gently.

Thunderhill fans, note that this is a previously unreleased recording, one of hundreds I've digitized over recent years encompassing every known live recording of the band (and related groups) between 1958 and 2009. I'm working on a project that will bring some of the highlights to Thunderhill's adoring public sometime, like, kind of soon.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Guitar & lead vocal

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass & harmony vocal

"Sloop John B (Live)" performed by Thunderhill

"Sloop John B (Live)" performed by Rex Broome & Clifford Ulrich

Bonus VIDEO of Rex & Cliff's performance of the song at the Atwater Village Street Fair

90. "Born to Fight" by Green on Red

Listening to Green on Red always makes me happy. I couldn't describe myself as a rabid fan or anything-- I'm still only a few years into really getting them, and they have a lot of records to absorb-- but whenever I hear one of their records, it always seems just right. It's not fair that they get lumped in with all the Paisley Underground bands... they really have few if any true psychedelic leanings. But at the same time, for all their rootsiness, they're never stridently earnest about it. At all. Which makes them all that much more authentic in a way. Maybe it's really just that the Paisley Underground scene shouldn't have been pegged, in name or thought, so directly to '60s revivalism; it was much richer than that. I've been exploring it in some depth for the past few years and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface.

I did a funny little thing with the arrangement. Maybe it's too cute. I hope the feel of the song is still there, though.

Personnel: Rex

"Born to Fight" performed by Green on Red

"Born to Fight" performed by Rex Broome

89. "Don't Waste Another Day" by The Muffs

After a day like yesterday when your best efforts still don't git it, you tend to feel obliged to get one really right. I think I did so on this one, with Eden's help. It was a natural to have her sing it-- it's a song like one she would write or even cover in her band Wye. It was mostly a matter of putting in the work. It turned out way way janglier than the original for a couple of reasons, one being my use of the 12-string and my sudden accidental discovery of a trick to make it sound really really good, and another being the way Eden opted to change the wall-of-sound rhythm guitar into a much choppier John Lennon kind of thing.

Sometimes you get a weird inkling to faithfully recreate a really odd bit of an original song. In this case, it was a weird mistakey-sounding boop noise right before the second guitar comes in... it might be a brief burst feedback, but on repeated listens it doesn't sound like it. I was going to use the guide tone feature on one of our guitar tuners-- the sound of the pitch of the selected note, the one you never use on purpose and irritates the hell out of you when you activate it by accident-- which sounds just like the noise on the recording, but as the track started to take shape as something people might actually want to listen to more than once, it seemed silly to put something so weird on it. Does that mean I have some kind of subconscious bias against weird experimentalism? You sure wouldn't think so, but I can't say as I know for sure.

Personnel:

Eden Hain ~ Lead vocal, rhythm guitar, additional engineering

Rex Broome ~ 12-string and guitar solo, everything else

"Don't Waste Another Day" performed by The Muffs

"Don't Waste Another Day" performed by Eden Hain & Rex Broome

88. "Outlaw" by Mission of Burma

If nothing else, my record collection is, for the most part, acquitting itself fairly well in term of what The Machine has selected for me. There are many bands whose records might equally well be found in good and bad music libraries; Mission of Burma is not such a band.

This song, doubtless like numerous other Burma tunes, was extremely difficult to figure out, and then, having sort of done so, translate to the acoustic idiom. I was hoping to get it into some kind of spooky mountain-minor murder ballad shape, but neither my will nor my skill could quite take it there. The noisy guitar was a last minute concession... it's actually not a second guitar, just a copy of the first one with a cranky effect on it. I tip my hand as to that little trick in case it seems like the second guitar is supposed to be a "lead" track. It ain't, and if it were I would've done a better job of it. But the clock wound down on me, so file this under "Fail", possibly with the subheading "noble" according to your own taste.

Personnel:

Eden, Gen & Rex ~ Chain gang vocals

Rex ~ Everything else

"Outlaw" performed by Mission of Burma

"Outlaw" performed by Rex Broome

87. "I Saw Three Ships" by Unknown Instrumental Group

The last time The Machine selected a Christmas tune for me, I recoiled from its unseasonal holiday cheer and insisted on remaking it completely. But I've matured since then. "Matured" is a word that means you tried something and it turned out to be hard and you don't want to do it again.

The title on the "album" from which this original comes is Unlabeled Cassette of Instrumental Christmas Carols Found at the Rexrode Residence, which is exactly what it was. My mom ended up with it when cleaning out her mother's house a few years ago; I found it along with some cassettes of old radio programs (which I digitized along with the carols, because that's what I do) and a pair of old Hohner harmonicas, which had belonged to my Grandfather Rexrode. I hadn't known he'd played harmonica or any musical instrument until then (although he was responsible for one of my earliest magical musical memories, a demonstration of a cylinder gramophone, which I wrote into the lyrics of the Skates & Rays song "Fort Ashby")... my mom was passing all of these items on to me.

So it seemed natural to reunite these tokens of my grandparents for today's cover, and making Granddad's harmonica the lead instrument on the recording. That meant playing harmonica with a little more precision than I'd ever attempted before. For the unitiated, most harmonicas are in a particular key, so if you're playing in C major and you're playing a C harmonica (like Granddad's), it's hard to play a "wrong" note, and with just a little experience you can learn how to blunder through melody lines that resolve more or less sensibly and you're okay. However, because of the way the instruments constructed, with certain notes only occurring with exhales and others with inhales, it's actually kind of hard to learn to play the "right" note at the "right" time in a prescribed melody like this familiar Christmas song. I tried pretty hard and got close enough in the limited time available to me. It sure isn't perfect, but it marks a step forward for my harp playing... not that that's saying much. Hopefully Granddad would have thought it a fair effort.

Personnel: Rex

"I Saw Three Ships" performed by Unknown Instrumental Group

"I Saw Three Ships" performed by Rex Broome

86. "Flip Your Face" by James Chance & The Contortions

The central conceit on my version of this one might be too obvious. But I still think it sounds cool.

Personnel:

Rex ~ Everything.

"Flip Your Face" performed by James Chance & The Contortions

"Flip Your Face" performed by Rex Broome

85. "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" by The Arcade Fire

Time is of the damn essence in these things. Eden was supposed to sing on this one, too, but she was out at a play with a friend and didn't get home until her bedtime. We've rushed things through in the past, but it just wasn't happening this time. Consequently there's a lot more of my voice on this one than I would have liked.

I am, however, especially pleased that Ridley and Miranda got to sing on it. The Arcade Fire was the first band Miranda ever saw, at the Hollywood Bowl about a year before she started Kindergarten, and she's loved the band ever since. The year after that was my "bachelor" period, and whenever the kids were at my little apartment we'd have Funeral on as our soundtrack, and even now Ridley, who was three at the time, recognizes songs from that album as things we used to listen to at "our old house".

Aside from the kids singing on it, I wanted to take this song down in scale a bit: it's huge and expansive, but it has a very intimate story at its core, and I wanted to bring that out. I still wanted it to build, but far more gradually, and to a more... I don't know, domestic-sounding crescendo. That was the idea at least. My favorite detail is the little drum part that sneaks in just at the very end... mellow as it is, it's the first thing played on an approximation of a kit in the whole song, and the fist element to deviate from the very straight beat of the song. There's more, of course, but these things are getting too long...

Personnel:

Ridley Broome: Voice #1, artwork

Miranda Broome: Voice #2, artwork

Rex Broome: Voice #3, everything else

"Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" performed by The Arcade Fire

"Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" performed by Ridley, Miranda & Rex Broome

84. "Has Anyone Seen My Man" by Memphis Minnie

Recorded this after the longest (albeit invisible to readers because I'd gotten well ahead of myself) break between sessions since beginning 39-40. Just hit a bit of a wall.

Happenstance and free association play big roles in how I decide to treat each song thrown at me by The Machine. This one turned out to be all about a guitar. After deciding to do this tune even more stripped-down than Minnie's original and what to do about the title gender (and I hope I came up with a semi-novel approach), I got to staring at that nice archtop our girl's playing in the photo. I have a similar-looking guitar (see photo), although it's a tenor (4-string) and a bit of an oddity... it's the oldest guitar I have, with more than 50 years on it, and I grew up thinking it was my grandfather's because it was at his house. In reality, it was one of the earlier guitars my dad owned. When trying to piece together its history he guessed that he may or may not have picked it up in San Antonio in the mid-'50s; most Harmony guitars were sold through the Sears Catalog, so that's a possibility, too.

What we do know is that by 1958 it was being used in promotional photos for one of Dad's early bands, and in the past decade I used it for the same purposes with The Chiggers (whose frontwoman Nigel actually did play a tenor). And that it is and always has been virtually unplayable. As far as I know, it's never been recorded, probably for that very reason. But given its family history, I decided to give it an airing on this track, and so, not for the first time, I set about rehabbing it to the best of my abilities, and, subsequently, trying to keep it in tune for the duration of the setting (which was very difficult without plyers). It may very well be seen again, but this is in all likelihood the last time it'll be heard by the general public as well as the first.

Personnel: Rex

"Has Anyone Seen My Man" performed by Memphis Minnie

"Has Anyone Seen My Man" performed by Rex Broome

83. "20th Century Boy" by T.Rex

"Hi, I'm Rex."

"Hey, did you know there was a band called T.Rex?"

And so it took me a while to appreciate Marc Bolan's music. But one gets over these things, and I've been a fan for a good long time now.

Yet another thing that I've had in mind since I had the idea for 39-40 is that there are karaoke versions available of a great number of songs, and how it might be interesting to do something with that. The truth is that, to this point, very very few of the songs The Machine has selected for me have been broadly popular enough to have karaoke versions, and the few times I've been assigned ones that are (like yesterday), I've had other strategies in mind. But what I thought might be interesting would be to take a karaoke track, which pretty much by definition would be much more professionally played and produced than anything I'm going to come up with in my living room, and sing entirely wrong (or rewritten) words over it. I had something a little bit artier in mind than what I came up with for this one; I've had a sort of half-written goof song called "Rock & Roll Millipede" kicking around for years, and I have a hard time letting go of even really bad ideas, so I put these two ideas, which are both in the least highly suspect, together.

Maybe next time it'll be a little bit less of a goof...

Personnel:

Omnibus Karaoke ~ backing track

Rex Broome ~ lead vocal

"20th Century Boy" performed by T.Rex

"20th Century Boy" performed by Rex Broome

82. "Live and Let Die" by Paul McCartney

Looking over the lyrics to this tune as she was about to sing it, Eden asked, "Wow, was he really depressed when he wrote this?" She hadn't connected it with the whole James Bond theme thing, which offered a fresh perspective on what is a pretty fatalistic piece just standing on its own. What I did to it musically is pretty much just demented. It seems like 39-40 is just going through a bit of a phase like that.

Personnel:

Eden Hain ~ lead vocal

Rex Broome ~ everything else

"Live and Let Die" performed by Paul McCartney

"Live and Let Die" performed by Eden Hain & Rex Broome

81. "The New Orleans Function: The Death of Jazz" by Wynton Marsalis

Sadly, Mr. Marsalis can have had absolutely no idea how accurately titled this piece would be by the time I was done with it. I had to enlist my robot girl Anjali to help explain this one, and even she ended up with an ambiguously pitch-shifted voice due to some kind of odd transfer error. You can hear me doing just a little bit of improvisational soloing on the one instrument on which I can meaningfully do that sort of thing, but, once again, when the lion's share of the piece's soul lies in its liveness, the interation between the musicians, I may have to resort to novelty to make anything out of it if it's just me in a room with some instruments and microphones.

Note the brief appearance of a pre-Obama-controversy Reverend Jeremiah Wright in the liner note science Anjali drops on ya.

Personnel:

Anjali ~ vocals

Rex ~ everything else

"The New Orleans Function: The Death of Jazz" performed by Wynton Marsalis

"The New Orleans Function: The Death of Jazz" performed by Rex Broome feat. Anjali

80. "Rose of Tralee" by The Houghton Weavers

So this project has reached a point where I'm starting to take stock of how many of my initial ideas I've used and whether the remaining ones are any good. One of the questionable ones was to transform a song or two into "dramatic readings" or even something akin to a radio play, with characters and sound effects and so forth... maybe that'll happen eventually, althoug it sounds like quite a task. But the spoken word thing seemed pretty do-able, except for the part where I'm sick of my own voice again, so I solicited recordings over Facebook. The voice you hear on this track is that of Ross Overbury, who in the course of volunteering reminded me that he's been soliciting performances of monk vocals for nearly a month, which did make me rightly feel like a bit of a self-centered nimrod and get just such a recording to him. This is the part where the internet is kind of fun.

The backing track is a song written by my longtime friend and writing partner Charlie Eckstrom. It's a 15-year-old demo from a 4-track cassette... each track digitized individually, respeeded, synched, trimmed and married to new drum tracks and overdubs with every bit of its analog hissiness preserved. Although it came close to having lyrics a few times, it was generally knows as "The New Wave Song" for reasons which are less than obscure.

Personnel:

Ross Overbury ~ vocal

Charlie Eckstrom ~ electric guitars and composition

Rex Broome ~ bass and acoustic guitar, assembly and editing

"The Rose of Tralee" performed by The Houghton Weavers

"The Rose of Tralee" performed by Ross Overbury, Charlie Eckstrom & Rex Broome

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