Another week and another new Laptop Sessions acoustic cover song music video for you here on the best (and probably only) cover songs blog ever! Today, I continue two different ongoing series: “The quarantine hair sessions” (in which my hair looks particularly ridiculous this time) and the “My kids’ favorite songs sessions”.
Yes, “You Won’t Have To Cry” is a favorite of my Angelina Rose, who is two years old. Every time she cries (again, she’s two, so this is a common occurrence) I pick her up and I sing her this song. She asks me to sing it for her (something my son never really did- he never asked me to play or sing songs to him and would rather do it on his own!) and loves watching my other videos so I figured I’d make a video of this song for her to add to the repertoire. Her current favorite Laptop Sessions videos include “Sorry Again” (which she calls “The Captain song” because Captain Feathersword of the Wiggles sings it!) and “Do You Wanna Dance?”. She also insists on hearing the song I wrote for her (which she calls “the Angie Rose song”) on a daily basis.
“You Won’t Have To Cry” is one of the earliest Byrds songs, which was workshopped during the Preflyte sessions before they hit it big with Columbia Records and “Mr. Tambourine Man”. This is a classic Clark-McGuinn composition and I just love those opening chords. There’s actually a second guitar playing a different part, as it’s McGuinn on his 12-string electric Rickenbacker (which I weighed using for this cut but decided against because I wouldn’t be playing McGuinn’s picking part anyway) and Crosby’s rhythm. I chose to go with the chord shape I used in this video because it sounded the most full when playing it solo on acoustic (cue my father saying, “Solo you can’t hear it”).
This song is also a duet with Gene Clark and David Crosby (who does some great high notes) singing together. I thought it would be interesting to sing this by myself because that’s how I sing it to Angie in her rocking chair each evening before bed. And, because I’m clearly obsessed with these kids and love the fact that my daughter likes her father’s music, I’m pretty much sticking with what makes them happy for a while. I also, though, hope it makes you happy, too! I’m over 2,000,000 views on my YouTube account now and have been doing so much work fixing the blog, creating title cards for all my old videos, redoing all the keyword tags, and so much more that my daily views have doubled in the past three weeks. Not bad. But, there’s still plenty of work to do if I’m going to get back to (and over) the 1,200 views per day I had at the peak of the series. Maybe if I cut my hair people will want to watch these videos more… 🙂