Think About Your Troubles – Harry Nilsson

This week’s song “Think About Your Troubles” comes from a Harry Nilsson album called “The Point” which is also a made for tv animated musical show that aired on ABC in 1971. It’s about a young “boy” who is missing a point on the top of his head while everybody else in his town has one. The story is a take on the classic Ugly Duckling story where the outcast has an adventure and all the town’s people learn a moral lesson in the end. I suppose it’s for kids, but the songs on the album are really good and most of them can exist outside of the story.

This song for example just tells the simple story of a guy crying at his breakfast table and what happens to the tears as the trickle out of his eyes. I love this song and first heard it when Robbie Fulks sang the song in a stage production of The Point that happened at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I think the director of the show was hoping to stage the production more than those two performances, but got busted by someone in charge of Harry Nilsson’s property rights and they wanted a lot of money. I wish more people could have seen it ’cause the music was great and the characters in the story were all done with puppets.

Best,

Peter – ACA

It’s Only Love – The Beatles

My Dad suggested doing this song and I made it happen. “It’s Only Love” comes from The Beatles album Help! which got played around my house a lot when I was a kid. To say McCartney/Lennon songwriting was a big influence on me is an understatement. I think it’s been an influence not only as a songwriter, but as a singer too. I’m always trying to make a memorable melody for the vocal when I write a song. There isn’t one Beatles song that I can think of that isn’t recognizable and hummable. My Dad says that no matter what else is going on in popular musc, be it image, trend shifts, and popularity contests, it always comes back to the songs. He feels lucky to have been a part of an era of so much growth in the world of rock ‘n’ roll and the golden age of radio. He was also happy that I was born on October 9th, which happens to be John Lennon’s birthday too… For years I cranked “Birthday” from the White Album every morning on October 9th.

So for the song I didn’t want to copy the original recording too much, ’cause Beatles music is uber classic. I kept the vocal and guitar parts the same, but put a drum machine beat with a different bass line and it ended up morphing into some kind of lounge/calypso thing. This might make someone puke. But I had fun doing it and there’s no end to the amount of gunk that you can put up on the internet anyway. I think the real question here is: if John Lennon were still alive, would he have a blog???

Best, Peter – ACA

Faith – George Michael

This week’s song “Faith” by George Michael is one of those mega-hits that everyone knows and has been played a million-plus times on the radio. The people behind it have probably made their fortune of that one song alone. Not to mention that it was doubly famous for the ass shaking video that came with it. It’s also been made notoriously awful by Limp Bizkit’s cover in the 90’s.

So why am I posting it? Well, like last week’s Elvis Costello tune it came out of working on a tribute show for George Michael. My friend Chris organized a Halloween show and tapped me to come up with something I could do as a one man show. I worked my ass off on the George Michael songs and they came out really true to the originals. Two things impressed me by working on these covers: 1 – George Michael can sing his ass off and is hard to copy and 2 – the production work on these songs is intense and amazing. The details are numerous and make these mega-hits more than your average 3 chord song that captures the imagination of the mass American culture. (I guess George Michael is English anyway, so there you go…)

There’s a lot going on in this one from the drum programming, to the hand claps, the layers of acoustic and electric guitars, the vocal nuances, the background vocals… I love listening back to this one, because there are a lot of elements wizzing by, especially in the 2nd half.

So this one goes out to Chris Anderson, my good friend of almost 10 years. He just got married recently and I told him he should make t-shirts for his friends that say “The Beast has been tamed!”

Best, Peter – ACA

Welcome To The Working Week – Elvis Costello

A few years ago I was in an Elvis Costello tribute show and “Welcome To The Working Week” was one of the numbers I put together. I’ve always really liked this song and the fact that it’s the lead track from My Aim Is True makes it that much better. I’m a sucker for a short/hot song that starts and album and gets things off to a running start.

The lyrics also totally fit the modern-day working-man’s-plight style that I was into a few years ago when my Bees album came out. At the time I was sick of love songs, sick of songs about angst, and generally sick of songs that were about the songwriter, per se. I was trying to find some kind of new ground using plots and characters to evoke emotion rather than talking about being emotional. It was more about scenarios.

I’ve gotten off that tip and am trying out new ground, but revisiting this song reminded me just how great a lyricist Elvis Costello is. Maybe it’s not even the words exactly, but the conviction he sings them with. He’s like David Bowie in that way. You may not always understand what the two of them are singing about, but they have a great dramatic way of acting out their songs. Enjoy!

BTW, I have had a cold this week, so I’m sure you’ll hear it in the lead vocal…

Best, Peter – ACA

Downbound Train – Bruce Springsteen

My dad asked me what song I was going to do this week for the blog and I told him I was working on The Pretenders “Don’t Get Me Wrong.” He scoffed and said that song is “fluff” and proceeded to tell me three Beatles songs I should do instead. I promised I’d do a Beatles song soon, but there’s just so many of them.

Anyway, it threw me off and when I went back to work on the Pretenders’ song, I got discouraged and thought it was sounding like crap. So, I unearthed this older cover that I was never totally happy with. It’s “Downbound Train” from Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. album.

I really like the Boss’ original version, but as Abraham said at the last Baby Teeth practice “It’s no fun trying to sound like the E Street band.” My idea for the arrangement of this cover was to take the guitar part and make it into the bass line. I was kind of trying to emulate “Everything In Its Right Place” from Radiohead’s Kid A album; how the bass line is also the melodic center that everything else fluctuates around. Then I came up with a synthesizer part that uses the notes of the chord changes.

The thing that drew me into this song the first few times I heard it is that it paints a truly bleak portrait of a working man with a broken heart and a dismal blue collar future. For all of the Bruce Springsteen anthems that use these two themes, most of the famous songs put a tiger’s heart into the protagonist and a never-say-die attitude about life, love, adventure, and everything else. But “Downbound Train” has no happy ending and no better-luck-next-time message. “Now I work down at the car wash / where all it ever does is rain / don’t you feel like you’re a rider on a downbound train.” I love that image of the poor bastard covered in dirty water like a permanent dark cloud hangs over him.

Best, Peter (ACA)

This Whole World – Beach Boys

This week’s post goes directly out to Matt Kessler, my friend from Champaign, IL. He’s also one of the creative minds behind Eye Rocket Books. Very original, awesome stuff. He gave me a burned copy of the Beach Boys’ album “Sunflower” where “This Whole World” comes from. It’s an album post Pet Sounds and into the less well-known and popular era of the Beach Boys.

This song contains some of the great elements of classic Beach Boys material and clocks in at less than 2 minutes! It’s a pretty complicated chord progression for a pop song. The verse goes from C major to F major to E minor to G major to A minor, back to F major, to A major to F# minor to B minor to E major to C# minor. All that happens in a matter of less than 30 seconds! Woah… Lots of pop songs are made of 3 chords and don’t change that much. Just goes to show how off the charts these guys were.

I’m particularly proud of this week’s post because I started to work on this months ago and canned it cause it wasn’t going well. But I had to get back to it and it came together quite fast. The vocal harmonies are really layered in the original and saturated with reverb, so I did that too. The lead vocal is doubled or tripled in the original too, so I tracked myself singing the lead part 3 times and mixed them together. The fade out at the end is copied directly from the original. It goes into this incredible acapella vocal break and fades out seconds later. It’s a very weird decision considering it is the climax of the song. Oh well, I guess they knew what they were doing…
Best, Peter (ACA)

Videotape – Radiohead

There is a theory about doing covers I have that if the original song is too good or too classic that it doesn’t warrant making your own version. For example, it wouldn’t make sense for anyone to cover “These Arms Of Mine” by Otis Redding, because you’d always compare their vocal performance to the original. Or doing a cover of “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin, because the drums are so incredible on the original album version.

I’ve always been scared to do a Radiohead cover, because they’re one of my favorite bands and because their records sound so amazing. Everyone in the band creates such nuanced parts that together their arrangements always seem full and right. On top of that, they work exhaustively in the recording studio to get great performances and sounds.

But with this weeks’ song “Videotape” the original version is very sparse: mostly piano, vocal, bass, and some percussion whirling around in effects. There’s a lot of room in the arrangement to mess around with other ideas. So I thought “what the hell” and took a crack at it. I feel like I could have spent a lot more time with it, but my friend Abraham said about his own blog that part of the process is to put it up when the times comes for another post. Whether it’s “done” or not, the time has come to post it.

I don’t have a piano so I sampled a rhodes using a casio and played the piano part that way. I also doubled it on guitar and came up with an extended variation on the original part for acoustic guitar. The bass is pretty much just like the original and the vocal too, with a couple of new background parts. I also used the casio for a new melody on the coda.

This post also marks the debut of my new MPC1000 sampler/drum programmer. I’ve been wanting one for a long, long time and now I have one. I know I’m not the first to own one, or to say anything about them, but…it is so sweet. I’m going to have lots of fun with it. Until my fingers bleed and my eyeballs fall out.

Best,

Peter – ACA

Ram On – Paul McCartney

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I’m a major Paul McCartney fan. Of course I grew up listening to the Beatles, cause my dad played them non-stop. A few years ago I started to investigate the post-Beatles Paul McCartney albums and found that there was some stuff I really liked.

This week’s cover is “Ram On” from the Ram album of 1971. If you don’t have the original you should go and check it out. It features predominantly a ukulele, vocals, whistles, and some primitive drumming. I decided to make it buzz a little more with some distorted bass and crunchy drums. Otherwise I stayed pretty true to the form, except for a little “chopped and screwed” editing toward the end. I had been also listening to Spank Rock’s “YoYoYoYoYo” album a lot during the time I made “Ram On” and there is a song at the end of their album called “Screwville USA” that I was trying to emulate a bit.

My dad will always take a crack at Sir Paul whenever he gets the chance, but I’m here to defend him. If you look at John Lennon’s post-Beatles output a lot of it is total crap. Now, I’ll admit, a lot of Paul’s post-Beatles work is crap too, but if you take the time to listen to Ram, McCartney, McCartney II there’s a lot of music that predates the indie-rock bedroom music of the 90’s and beyond. Respect.

Best,

Peter (ACA)

Philadelphia – Neil Young

This Neil Young song Philadelphia comes from the movie of the same name. While not as popular as Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia” single also from the movie, it is definitely my favorite of the two. If you’ve seen the movie, then you know when this song comes on you become a crying wet noodle sitting on the couch with your roommate. It’s a beautiful song and a very touching vocal performance by Neil.

I also have an affection for the actual city of Philadelphia and have had the pleasure of traveling there a few times in the last couple years, so I liked making that connection too. I tried to stay very true to the original song on this one. Neil plays the piano throughout instead of the guitar, but I don’t have access to a grand piano in my bedroom where all these tracks are recorded.

By the way, all these songs can be downloaded by right clicking and saving for Windows users or by letting the quicktime file load all the way and selecting save from the File menu for Mac users. Trust me, they sound okay coming off computer speakers, but WAY better on CD or an iPod while blasting down the highway in your Geo Tracker.

Cold Blooded Old Times – SMOG

I can’t remember where I heard this song the first time and I’ve been trying to all week. It doesn’t really matter though, because this week’s post makes a pretty good partner to last week’s Joanna Newsom post. The only time I’ve ever seen SMOG live was when Joanna Newsom guested as his pianist for the night.
Cold Blooded Old Times comes from SMOG’s “Knock Knock” album and I really could count the songs on one hand that I’ve heard of his whole entire catalog. I went after this one pretty straight ahead. I wasn’t trying to rearrange this song at all, but just give it a good run for it’s money. The lyrics are great and evocative and I figure if you get the vocal right on certain songs you’ve done your job. The only thing I wish is that I could have come up with the “type of memory that turns your bones to glass” line. Dag.

Best,  Peter (ACA)