Here's where I ruin that John Sebastian song everyone likes.
I think this song is usually sung much more upbeat than the words tell it to be. John Sebastian performed it on a lark at Woodstock, which I think is so cool. He just happened to be backstage and they needed an acoustic act, so he grabbed a guitar, took the scaffold, and happened to have Darling Be Home Soon in his head from his days with Lovin' Spoonful (they'd recently broken up).
I enjoy the idea that all a person wants is to talk with his lover while she's away. I'm kind of going through this with someone right now. All I can really imagine is lying in bed and discussing and hatching adventures we can go on together.
I hope my interpretation conveys that feeling a little more than the original.
Here's where I ruin that Billy-Ray Cyrus song everyone liked. I always thought it would be better as a sad song because the lyrics are really a downer. It reads like what you would write if you were making fun of an old-fashioned country break-up song.
I especially like all the poetic turns the song makes around body parts in general and fingers/lips in particular.
First You can tell my lips to tell my fingertips they won't be reaching out for you no more.
And then You can tell your brother Cliff whose fist can tell my lip he never liked me anyway.
That's pretty golden because it rhymes both halves of the song in a way that links them thematically and gives your brain a little flash of slanted recollection. It's a neat little song, and even though it does not stand up to the test of time, I can see why it was such a huge success.
In the 80's John Waite belted out this bad boy for one of the greatest songs of his era. It was his biggest hit, and he's still singing it. He even did a country version with Alison Krauss. Tina Turner did a version of it in the 90's that I always thought was kind of an Ike burn song. It's been covered a million times. Brooks and Dunne, Rod Stewart, and tons of others have done it. I hate pretty much all the covers, including even the Alison Krauss duet. It always sounds overly earnest or over-produced or just too loud.
I think it tracks better as a stripped down sad and quiet song. You could argue that a belting lament is always welcome on a record, but I'd say the song's too good for that.
I love how old-fashioned it is. It mentions long-distance lines, which is so funny because there's no such thing anymore. It reminds me of how hard (and expensive) it was to have a long-distance relationship back in the day when you could barely hear someone through the static of a long-distance phone call. You might as well send a telegraph to be clear. So he sends his lover's soul a telegraph! That's really funny and sappy and such a true feeling for a little pop song. I love how he admits to lying to himself and how he confesses to his hyperbolic desperation. The confessional parts of the song are simply great because they're intimate and relate-able.
Anyway, here's my sad version of it. I'm noticing myself looking down a lot in these videos. I'm looking at the microphone. It looks like I'm reading or something, but the whole point of me doing these is to really live in the songs, so I memorize the lyrics and change them a little when I sing. I do actually care for you to know that I'm not reading these lines.
HERE'S WHERE I RUIN THE FLAMING LIPS: YOSHIMI BATTLES THE PINK ROBOTS, PT 1
I remember in 1995 the Flaming Lips were playing at the Peach Pit in Beverly Hills. At least, I remember when Beverly Hills 90210 featured the band in one of their episodes, and all the kids at Beverly High were stoked. I thought they were pretty good, and I didn't think about them much after that.
I moved to Germany when I was 19 years old in 1999.
When I was 26, a student at UC Berkeley, I hung out a lot in Oakland bars. At some point, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt 1 came on, and everyone was surprised I hadn't heard it. Their most successful album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots had been released in 2002. I'd missed it abroad.
I instantly fell in love with the experimental psychedelic sound and the lyrics that seem to be saying one thing but meaning something entirely different.
My friends at the time were mostly artists and poets, people who maybe often feel like they are alone without anyone looking out for them. Maybe it was just me. Either way, my circle of friends took to singing the song at the tops of our lungs any chance we could. If there was a jukebox, we chose it. If we were closing down the bar, our friends behind it put this song on and sang along. Here's what Billboard said about the album:
"beneath the sunny, computer-generated atmospherics and the campy veneer of talk about gladiator-style clashes between man and machines with emotions, Yoshimi is actually a somber rumination on love and survival in an unfathomable world."
During the chorus we'd choose someone to point at and sing that they wouldn't let the robots eat us. Every time we shouted "Oh Yoshimi!" we pointed at a new person until everyone was included. The robots are everywhere. They're programmed to destroy artists and writers or people who just care about anything in the indifferent universe. Sometimes, for fleeting moments, maybe you have a few Yoshimis around you who might take their vitamins, learn karate, and keep you safe. When those people are around, sing them a song. If you can't sing, just play them this.
Here's where I ruin that Radiohead song everyone likes
When I was a kid, I had to go to my friend's house to watch MTV because my family didn't have cable. I was a jealous friend. When I was 14, we moved to Orange County, and the HOA wouldn't allow antennae, which meant we had to get cable. And it happened to be the greatest years in MTV history.
In the early and mid-90's, the music world was a filled with great acts like Nirvana, Bon Jovi, Dr. Dre, 2 pac, Cypress Hill, Radiohead. And some of the best work from your favorite 80's stars like Madonna, Janet Jackson came out at that time. Everyone was making music videos, and they were cool as hell.
Radiohead came out with their first album, Pablo Honey. Four guitar players in a band? Why not! That guitar pound like a shotgun cocking to introduce the chorus of Creep was a wakeup call. Radiohead really stood out in the giant wave of alternative rock, and they'd go on to evolve and grow as I did through those formative years.
But Creep is so great because who hasn't felt like they "don't belong here"? It's a unique theme for a pop song but immediately accessible to everyone. And haven't you thought someone else was so perfect that you're ugly and unworthy by comparison? Well, Thom Yorke obviously has.
Much later I got off a train in Prague. A guy with a car said he ran a little hotel called Prague Lion and would give us a ride into town if we just checked out the hotel. I rode in front and Kid A was playing on his CD player. He'd gotten the album that day and was stoked. We ended up staying at his hotel and having a crazy adventure in the Czech Republic filled with absinth, running from the law, and an insane ossuary. But that's another story.
The two halves of the song mirror each other wonderfully. Ugly is echoed by horror, and disease rhymes with design as the first lines of both halves so that all the stuff in the middle is sandwiched together perfectly.
Plus, all the movie references in both halves strengthen that bond. Leather studded kiss in the sand is a reference to Sandy getting her leather kiss in Grease. And psycho, vertigo, and rear window are all references to Alfred Hitchcock movies.
What do all the movies have in common? The horror of romance? The dangers of love? The acceptance of our worst attributes? Who knows? Who really cares? Thematically, it works with the mechanics of the song in such a tight way that all the weird French stuff and the Fashion/Real Bitch bridge thing that happen in the original version are there just for fluff that work because the rest of the song is so damned strong.
My favorite part of the song is "I don't want to be friends." In the original version I swear I hear "I don't want to be French" the first time she says it after the French part of the song. But that could just be my lying ears.
Who can't relate to the sentiment of wanting more than friendship from someone? The complete letdown and heartbreak contained in the last few lines of the song, the idea that even a bad romance is better than friendship, is something I think everybody can relive at the close of the song. For a pop song to leave you lamenting one-sided love is impossible, so Lady Gaga belts out the chorus a few more times in the original.
It's a tricky little song in a lot of ways. Bad Romance has plenty for your brain to suss out and it happens to come in a fun package. I hope you like my stripped down version of it.
This is where I ruin that Bruce Springsteen everyone loves.
This song about someone remembering the Vietnam war ten years afterward is powerful in that its lyrics read like flashbacks. The narrator remembers how he got into the war, how he couldn't get a job afterward, how his friend died over there after having fallen in love with a Vietnamese woman, and how now he lives in the shadows of the penitentiaries and the fires of the refineries.
Springsteen hid all this in a pop anthem. Brilliant in that it's preserved for people like me who strip away everything and think about the words.
My microphone was giving me problems on this one, but I liked how it watered down the guitar and made my voice sound a little washed away too. So I haven't re-recorded for those reasons. Seems more painful and ruined this way.
The last line of the last verse is my favorite: "Nowhere to gun and nowhere to go"?!?! Gun rhymes with gone, like he's gone nowhere, but then of course, gunning being the only job he's ever really known beside working in a refinery or rotting in a penitentiary.
And of course, gun rhymes with run, and I've heard the Boss sing it as "run" before. But "gun" is better I think. It kind of sounds like "come" too, which screws with your brain when you hear "go" right after. And "gun" gives you a nice rhyme with "go" making the whole thing more true-feeling.
