It's Daniel, Son!
Well, that was weird. And yet at the same time, it makes perfect sense…
This past spring and into the summer, I homed in on a handful of cover songs, ones where I felt like I’d put a personal stamp on them. At the same time, with the arrival of my new guitar and some semi-regular gigging, I’d improved (slightly) as a player, and these covers seemed to showcase it (at least in terms of sheer speed and stamina). I wanted to record these songs, and make it snappy, have something to put out there just for fun. Only it wasn’t snappy. It was humid and my guitar kept going out of tune, week after week. And it was bringing me down.
And I was still down just earlier this week, and so I told Amy about it. She joked that rehearsing other peoples’ songs maybe wasn’t as fulfilling as rehearsing my own, since they couldn’t possibly be as good. There was actually a kernel of truth to the joke. Not that I have or ever will write a song as good as “Common People” (for example). But, you know, “personal stamps” aside, in the end the thing is written in someone else’s voice, and coming out of my larynx, those words and melodies will never quite resonate the same as my own.
I don’t know. I think maybe covers are meant to be one-offs. Learning one on a lark, seeing how the chords mesh, being surprised by it and then throwing it into a setlist to spice things up — that makes sense, it’s fun AND educational. Keeps you limber as a composer, and they’re (usually) crowd-pleasers. But playing a cover over and over again… It can be a drag. (Unless it’s a Feelies song, of course, heh.)
Plus, I’m serious about that humidity thing. I’ve been riding my bike to and from work four days a week, 10 miles each way, and the last thing I’ve wanted to do when getting home was heading to the basement and sweating some MORE. But I’d been doing it anyway, and between my overheated dispiritedness and the strings going out of tune every two minutes, it just felt like a huge uphill battle.
Then Thursday I got up and it wasn’t that humid for a change. I had regular coffee instead of iced for a change. And then, just to have something to do, I changed the strings on the guitar. Had some more coffee. And then, trying not to get my hopes up, I set up the microphone in front of the amp. Played with the dog and had some more coffee. And then I dialed up GarageBand and set up a click track. I’d been thinking a mechanical approach might help me finish the recordings. The click track lasted thirty seconds until I turned it off.
After that, it was like Karate Kid, like I’d been painting fences all summer, and now I was waxin’ on and off and on again. All that uphill battling had me more familiar with the songs than I’d realized, and all I had to do was relax into it and have FUN. And that’s exactly what I did. I did guitars, vocals, and harmonies for all five covers in about two and a half hours. I cranked the box fan between takes, dried my brow regularly with fresh bandannas (wow, which Daniel AM I?), drank plenty of water — in short, did everything I could to keep myself comfortable, and by golly. I got it done.
