“Walter Johnson” (Jonathan Richman A Cappella Cover) – OPENING DAY DOUBLE HEADER 1 of 2

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For Jonathan Richman lyrics, CLICK HERE!

By Chris Moore:

Hey there, sports fans!  Welcome to yet another “Chris Moore Monday” here at the Laptop Sessions new music video blog.  Today, as you may already know, is the opening day for the 2009 season of the New York Mets.  Ah, America’s favorite pastime…

Baseball!

Because I couldn’t be home in time to watch the first Mets regular season game, I decided to celebrate by learning and recording not one but two cover songs tonight.  This is the first video, inspired by an encounter with one of my colleagues.  At the end of school on Friday, he stopped by my room and said simply, “Listen to Walter Johnson before opening day.”  All I could think to say was, “Is that a song or a person?”  Sure enough, it’s a song.  He smiled as he replied and repeated that I should listen to it before opening day.  So, as suggested, I looked it up on YouTube early this morning and found the Jonathan Richman song “Walter Johnson.”  It’s an a cappella performance from his 1995 album You Must Ask the Heart.

A search of Wikipedia produced a brief biography and a picture of Richman with a guitar and prominent eighties-era Tom Selleck chest hair.  I don’t know what I expected, but it was certainly interesting to put a face to the singer of this unique song.

Truth be told, I have no real idea what possessed me to record a version of “Walter Johnson.”  There’s something about recording your own version of a song that forces you to become intimate, if only temporarily, with a track.  In this case, I don’t have any plans to buy any Richman albums in the near future, so I figured it would be a long time before I heard “Walter Johnson” again.  Being that it was opening day, it only seemed appropriate that I would pay tribute to Walter Johnson by singing my own version of the song.

I hope you enjoy it.  Feel free, of course, to laugh as you wish.  The “bum ba bum ba bum” parts are pretty funny — at least, they were to me at first.   But, really, this is the perfect day to sing this song!

And this is only the first of two baseball-related tunes I’ve carved out for you today.

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“Development of a writer” – A retrospective by Jeff Copperthite (Part 2/3)

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One of the things that anybody who knows me well is that I am into a very special type of music.

No, it isn’t anything mainstream.  In fact, I can think of only 3 other people who enjoy this type of music as much as I do.

Quite simply, it is soundtracks from video games.   Especially Role Playing Games.

I have what I feel is a very impressive collection of OST (Original Soundtrack) from a variety of games.  One reason I think I enjoy the music so much is because I did grow up listening to the music from these games almost entirely.  When it comes to my favorite activity both now and then, it certainly is video games.

More so than any of my other hobbies.  It even surpasses the playing and writing of music.

So I have an ingrained affinity to the music.  I always had a great auditory memory as well.  I can still hum music from old Nintendo games I haven’t played in over 15 years.  If you say “Flash Man from Mega Man 2”, I will hum it in tune and on key.  You may even get some of that terrible synth drum channel that NES was notorious for.

But the ones I latched onto immediately are the Final Fantasy series’ OSTs.  I have them all.  And not just some remixed versions or user-generated remixes.  Just like I was playing the original version of the game.

Why do I enjoy listening to the music so much?  Plain and simple – it is something for me to listen too, and I can do almost any regular task while I listen.  Simply put, many papers got written while I listened to “Dancing Mad”, the final boss music from Final Fantasy 6, and other songs from those series.

As I discovered the fact that some more uncommon OSTs existed, I found as many of them as I could and got them.  I have the OSTs for such obscure games as Emperor: Battle for Dune (a favorite actually), Dune 2000, StarFox, Perfect Dark, Super Mario RPG, Secret of Mana (and all of it’s prequels and sequels), Ogre Battle (and it’s derivatives), and the F-Zero series.  Simply put, there’s a soundtrack for all kinds of moods.

Actually, now that I mention the “Emperor” soundtrack, it reminds me of a story.

About a year ago, I did something that I was always a bit afraid of, but knew I had to do – I donated blood.  I’ve always been a bit squeamish about things like this, but I knew it was the right thing to do.  To get me through it, however, I popped up the Emperor Soundtrack because the music had such a driving beat to it, and the tunes are so engrossing overall (I even asked the Phlebotomist to cover the donation bags so I couldn’t watch my blood being drawn).  I looked up at the ceiling of Sacred Heart’s Field House for a while and enjoyed it.  Hey, it got me through it.  I may even do it again in the future.

Well anyway, point is I have always enjoyed VG music.   I downloaded MIDI tracks as well.  But then I found a game that had a great soundtrack, but very few MIDI files for its music.

And so, I began the Final Fantasy Tactics Battle Music Project, which at the time was a regularly updated website with the files that I created using various implements, most notably a program called Noteworthy Composer.  My methods were this easy.  I used an audio recorder to tape the particular song of interest off of the TV while the game was playing.  Then I systematically tried to pick out the different instruments and parts, then try to transcribe them on the keyboard.  Once I had figured out one or two instruments, usually the rest were easy to pick out as well.  This method certainly wasn’t the best, but at the time I was very mad that these files didn’t exist, and I wanted to change that.

I ended up transcribing quite a few of the songs from the game, and within the next two years, I noticed lots of fan sites posting my MIDI files.  I also got lots of great comments, emails, and requests.  I did the majority of the work for files in this game within those two years, but I would go back periodically until I was done in college to update some of the songs that I knew better.

I also at one point in college (~2000 I think) did a similar site for Final Fantasy 9 called (how original) the FF9 MIDI Project.  Similar to FFT, I transcribed select songs due to not many being transcribed at the time.  I still find both of the MIDI files from these games around the internet.

It wasn’t long after this that I began composing music similar in style.  There will be more on that in the next edition of this series.  Stay tuned for that next month!

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“Do You Wanna Dance?” (Beach Boys Cover)

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By Jim Fusco:

Well, do you? 🙂

Welcome to another Jim Fusco Tuesday here on the Laptop Sessions acoustic cover songs music video blog.  I can’t believe it’s been another week- here I am again to send a new cover song music video your way.

I realized I’ve only done one Beach Boys song so far in 2009 (and a quite unknown one, at that), so I decided to please the Beach Boys faithful (who’d have to be REALLY faithful to wait three months for another video) by doing a song everybody knows in “Do You Wanna Dance?”!

Originally written and recorded by Bobby Freeman in the late 50’s, the Beach Boys version is very far removed from the original recording.  Freeman’s version has a more bossonova feel to it and is a little slower-paced.  Brian Wilson, clearly budding into an ambitious producer at the time, took the song and turned it pure mid-sixties rock and roll.  It peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart at Nubmer 12, and was the highest charting record with Dennis Wilson on lead vocals.

This was a great song for Denny to sing- I love the Beach Boys version so much more because Brian gave Dennis a chance to sing on it.  The production on the Beach Boys version is very Phil Spector influenced, so my acoustic cover version of it married the Beach Boys verison (in terms of style) without all the guitars, tympanies, etc.

I had to fight siging this song like Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys, as in concert he’s the one who sings Dennis’ lead vocals.  He sings much differently than Dennis normally would, so there’s different inflection to the words.  I sing more like Bruce than Dennis, so I was inclined to sing the Bruce version- but stopped myself and tried to stay true to Denny’s original vocal style, raspy voice not included.

Right after “Do You Wanna Dance?” was released, the Beach Boys came out with one of their Number One singles in “Help Me Rhonda”, a great song.  1965 was an amazing year for music, but especially for groups like the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan.  It was also the break-out year for the Byrds.  The Beach Boys’ “Today” album has to be one of the best recordings ever, especially because it combines the happiness of earlier Beach Boys albums and (some of) the production value of later recordings like “Pet Sounds”.

I hope you enjoy my version of “Do You Wanna Dance?”.  On a personal note, I’m scheduled to receive my copies of my new album, “Halfway There”, tomorrow on CD, but the release date still stands for April 7th.  I hope you’re as excited as I am!  When I get the CDs, I’m sure I’ll get ambitious and do a ton of promotion, so stay tuned!  Have a great week- I’ll try to post an original, but I’m pretty tired, so we’ll see.  Talk to you again soon!

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“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” (Bob Dylan Cover)

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For Bob Dylan chords and lyrics, CLICK HERE!

By Chris Moore:

It was definitely one of those “clouds parting” kind of Chris Moore Mondays for me.

First of all, I should clarify that “Chris Moore Mondays” is the title we use around here to remind you all that it’s my job to post a great cover song music video for you each and every Monday evening.  Next, I should explain the “clouds parting” aspect.  Well, I woke up around 5:30 this morning and was having serious difficulty getting myself out of bed.  Then, I noticed I had an email from bobdylan.com.

Long story short, I had woken up to find the link to a free download of the new, unreleased Bob Dylan track “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.’”  It will be track one on his upcoming album, Together Through Life, to be released on Tuesday, April 28th.  Sorry, Jim — this means that your birthday the following day is going to be something of an anti-climax.  😉

In all seriousness, this is an exciting bit of New Music Tuesday news.  After all, there were five years of separation between 2001’s Love and Theft and 2006’s Modern Times.  Now, it’s been less than three years and there’s a new release.  Based on the first track alone, I couldn’t be more excited.  It’s a pretty simple song — only three chords and a basic verse, chorus, repeat structure with a few instrumental breaks thrown in and a classic Dylan chorus style in which the lines in each chorus are slightly different.  I wasn’t sure what to think of the lyrics at first, but they’ve really grown on me today as I’ve listened to the song repeatedly and learned to play it.  I’m still not sure what to think of lines like “The whole world is my throne” or “And every window’s made of glass.”

The conclusion I’ve come to is that this is a deceptively simple song.  In the beginning of the song, Dylan sings of a lover in terms that express fairly standard love-song mentalities.  Still, by the end of the track, he compares himself to a ship in harbor with the sails up.  This implies that the ship is about to leave harbor, or perhaps that he is ready to move on to something — or someone — new.  And yet he goes on to tell his lover that she should lay her hand upon his head.  In typical Dylan fashion, even a love song has darker overtones, as played out in the chorus lines.  The choral sections really are my favorite lines.  “Beyond here lies nothin,’” he sings, “But the mountains of the past” or “Nothin’ done and nothin’ said.”  There is simply nowhere else he would rather be than where he is, as he acknowledges that there is nothing “beyond here.”  The questions, of course, are 1) where is “here”? and 2) does he really want to be “here” or are there simply no better options?

As I mentioned, it’s a fairly simple song.  Even I was able to figure it out in short order.  It’s three chords — Am, Dm, and E — easily within my register with an uptempo beat.  It’s actually caused a bit of a debate among Dylan fans who have disagreed over the use of accordion in the song and the state of Dylan’s vocal abilities.  As far as I’m concerned, the instrumentation is excellent, raw and loose but very intentional and fitting, accordion or no accordion.  As for Dylan’s voice, I read one user’s take on the fansite expectingrain.com.  He essentially said that Dylan’s vocals have deteriorated even more than they had on Modern Times.  My reaction is simple:

Really?

I mean, if you’ve followed Dylan over the past decade and enjoyed Time Out of Mind or the aforementioned two albums, then you know that his gritty vocals are fitting.  He may not stand a chance on American Idol, but I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing!  Another post that I read made a great deal of sense.  This user basically argued that Dylan’s vocals on studio recordings and during live performances should be weighed separately.  I agree with this — while his vocals may be a bit difficult to understand and follow in concerts at times, his studio recordings haven’t failed to impress me — including vocals, instruments, etc.

Needless to say, I hope you enjoy my take on this brand new Dylan song.  If you’re a guitarist, you should check out my chords and lyrics (see the link above) and have fun playing it yourself.  And, without further ado, I wish you a good night and a great week…

See you next session!

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