Tag Archives: chris moore

“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (Darlene Love Christmas Song Cover)

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By Jim Fusco:

Okay, this one was for fun, and I implore you- just for fun!  I was planning on doing this one all day.  I needed one more Christmas song before the big day and I’ve always enjoyed singing this one.  For the most part, I can sing the whole song without going into falsetto.  Of course, I usually have to project (a nicer word for scream) when I sing this song, so it was nicer to be in a quiet environment.

This was a LANDMARK day for the Laptop Sessions- we reached our highest view total yet for one day- 263 visitors!  Thank you to all who came to the site today and we sincerely hope you’ll continue to come back.  There are no plans of stopping here on the best music video blog in the universe.  Every time I say that, I think of those TV political news shows.  They always claim they have the “Best political team…” and then add: on television, in America, in the world, in the solar system, in the universe, of all time…

“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is the perfect album closer to probably the best Christmas album of all time- “A Christmas Gift For You from Phil Spector”.  That album was so innovative and actually featured GOOD original songs in a holiday mood.  Everyone whose been reading this blog for a while knows that I’m a fan of great album closers.  I hate when a band just shoves some plain old solo acoustic number at the end of the album.  It’s always such a downer and makes you long for Track 1 all over again.  Tonight’s song is one of those album closers that gets you goin’ again!  Plus, it’s the best song on the album, which is a rarity being right at the end.  I do need to point out that after this song, there is a special “Silent Night” track wiht a Christmas message from a very wimpy sounding Phil Spector, so that’s technically the closing track.   But not until I got the album on CD (we just always listened to a compilation of a hundred great Christmas songs my father put together) did I even know that track existed.  And, I shouldn’t have doubted my father’s choice to leave it off of his compilation- that track stinks.

Darlene Love’s vocals are just great on this track.  I hope I didn’t miss her singing this song on David Letterman this year.  She always sings it and she still sounds great.  Although, the pitch of the song has dropped down considerably over time.

I guess this song tonight just proves that I will go to great lengths to sing songs in the original key.  You may have noted that I sang the high parts in my last Christmas music video (Happy Xmas, War is Over) in a lower octave, albeit in the same key.  But, as always, I had a reason for that rare exception to my hard-and-fast rule.  Singing that part in the high register just sounded WAY too much like Yoko Ono, so I decided to salvage the song by taking Yoko out of the equation completely! 🙂

Enjoy tonight’s cover song music video.  I’m very excited, of course, for Christmas.  I know Chris and Jeff will make you proud with their holiday offerings over the next two days.  I can’t wait to see what I got, but more importantly, to see the reactions on the faces of people I got gifts for.  This is shaping up to be a nice Christmas.  I won’t talk to you until after the holiday, so I wish everyone the very best and I thank you all for such a great and exciting year!

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“Christmas (From Now On)” (Chris Moore Original Acoustic Song)

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By Chris Moore:

Hello and welcome to a special Christmas Eve edition of your best bet for excellence in cover musicianship on the web — the Laptop Sessions home page!

For tonight’s video, I had initially planned on recording my original Christmas song “Moment.”  I have written two original Christmas songs in the past, and I already recorded the other (“Christmas Cards”) last year.  Thus, I began practicing “Moment.”  And I wish I had taken the time to record it earlier, because I really do like that song.  I take issue with some of the lyrics now, as I find them much too cheesy at points, but the overall feel of the song is one that I love.

Then, a song started coming to me.  And I’ll break my general silence on my songwriting process here, as there is such an amalgamation of influences and ideas that came together to forge this song.  First, you should know that I am purposely tipping my hat to the classic Christmas tune “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” with the beginning of my chorus lines.  Also, I used a chord pattern that Jim and I found to be recurrent in a lot of our favorite Christmas songs.  It’s a cycle of sorts with barre chords, starting with a major, going down two frets to a minor, then the lower minor on the same fret, and finally jumping back up to a higher fret.  Then, the same pattern is repeated.

In terms of what the words mean, I started off writing about my feelings about a very important person — my girlfriend of three years — who I’m no longer with.  I haven’t really resolved the situation, so there’s a lot on my mind and I think the emotion got this song started.

Then, I began to think about Christmas in general.  The past few years, I’ve really missed being able to spend the Christmas Eve festivities with my close friends.  Thus, the song shifted to be about reclaiming my Christmas traditions with my friends.

As the lyrics progressed and I changed lines, the song shifted again to be about my grandmother, who passed away a little over a year ago.  This is only my second Christmas without her, and I can’t understate how big a part she has always been of my Christmas.  As a kid, she and my grandfather would come over on Christmas Eve and we would have a really relaxing, enjoyable night — nights that I will forever remember with great fondness.  As a young man and up until last year, Christmas became an increasingly more important opportunity to spend quality time with her.  I don’t quite have the words right now in this format to describe what those days were like or what our relationship was like, and that’s what I tried to accomplish in the song.

Thus, I dedicate this song to my Grandma Moore, a person that I am truly better off for having known and grown up with.  I’m going to miss her a lot tomorrow, but writing this song really did help me to express some of that emotion.

As a final sidenote, I spent tonight at the second annual Fusco-Moore Experience Christmas Eve party.  I didn’t attend last year, but I figured I should probably attend this year, as my name is in the title and all…  According to Jim, the real reason I attended was because I didn’t have anything better to do.  Now, this may be true, but…  Seriously, though, tonight was really relaxing and fun, the food was amazing, I’m somehow still full from the multi-course meal, and thankfully, Jim’s mom cleaned the dishes.  It was a Christmas miracle, as far as I was concerned, that I didn’t have to clean them.  I always expect to, and there was more than double our average amount of dirty dishes tonight!  Thank you again, Mrs. Fusco!!

Jim, Mike, and I are planning a little get-together we’ll call “Mas Christmas” — or, for those of you who do not habla espanol, “More Christmas.”  I’m definitely looking forward to that!

For now, I’m off to get ready for Christmas morning.  It will be a full day, capped off by an all-new episode of TNA Impact! at 9pm in the Fusco Theatre.  And YOU will have an exciting new yuletide Jeff Copperthite video to look forward to…

Merry Christmas and see you next session!

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“Green Christmas” (Acoustic Christmas Cover)

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By Chris Moore:

Well, tonight’s going to be a brief one, and I apologize.  But I made up for it by calling in the big guns — aka one Jim Fusco for additional guitar stylings and harmony vocals — to make this video one my favorites that I’ve done.  It’s certainly the best Christmas video that I’ve recorded.  We had a lot of fun playing it, and I think that comes through on the recording.

I hope you enjoy it!

Oh, yeah, I should probably mention what song it is.  This is “Green Christmas,” one of the holiday originals on the Barenaked Ladies’ Barenaked For the Holidays album.  Second only to “Elf’s Lament” and maybe “Christmastime (Oh Yeah),” this is one of my favorite original tracks on the album.  There’s just the right mix of humor and seriousness on this record, and I think this one leans more toward the serious side.  I especially like the middle part — “Green, cause of everything I miss.  All this missletoe, no kiss…”

Simply put, this was a lot of fun to record.

And it’s certainly not like we haven’t played it before.  It’s been a while, but this song is officially part of our MoU Christmas Chord Book, Part II.  That’s right, we needed multiple chord books to contain the number of songs we learned for our Christmas shows.

The reason this post is so brief is that I remembered and recorded my video much later than I would have liked, and then, Jim and I watched the SNL “Best of Christmas Past” DVD while wrapping our gifts for Christmas.  It felt good to accomplish that while simultaneously watching some great skits — the Matt Foley “motivational speaker” Santa, Alec Baldwin’s “Shvety balls,” Eddie Murphy’s “Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood, and boy does the list go on… — and laughing (a lot!) together.

And, now, it will feel good to sleep…

See you next session!

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“Box Full of Letters” (Wilco Cover)

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By Chris Moore:

Hello and welcome to yet another all-new Laptop Session at your web blog for a session-a-day, guaranteed through December 31st, 2008. Now, that guarantee is swiftly running out, but don’t fret. We’ll be introducing a new schedule of performances for 2009 that will not only introduce many new types of posts to the blog on a regular basis, but also maintain a steady and prolific stream of new cover song music videos!

But, let’s focus on the present for now…

I had originally intended to record a Christmas song tonight, but I got busy with napping, fast food eating, Christmas shopping, and TNA Impact! viewing, so I decided to pull out my one and only “backup video.” If I haven’t already, I should introduce this video by announcing my desire to record a cover video for at least one song from each Wilco album. I’ve been listening to this band a lot these past several months, picking up their albums one by one as I find them on sale or used. I’ve already recorded a song from their third studio album, Summerteeth, called “How to Fight Loneliness” — that video is posted in the members only area of this blog (scroll down to the bottom to sign in and/or sign up!). Previous to that, I recorded “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” from their critically acclaimed fourth album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. This was a great song — easy to learn, fun to memorize the lyrics for the performance, and I even got a compliment from a former student who watched the video!

Last week, I picked up a copy of their subsequent album, A Ghost is Born. Ironically, I’m listening to that album now and — literally the moment I typed the title of the album (!) — I just heard Tweedy singing “a ghost is born…,” which is in the lyrics to the song “Theologians.” I don’t think that A Ghost is Born is as impressive an album as Foxtrot or as rocking and enjoyable an album as Summerteeth, but I’m warming to it. There’s a great deal of experimentation, particularly on the 15-minute penultimate track “Less Than You Think.”

But I’m not quite ready to record a song from that album yet, so I went back to the first Wilco album, A.M., which is the final album that I own thus far. This album was more of a straightforward country rock effort, reminiscent of their predecessor Uncle Tupelo. Tweedy himself doesn’t sound all that impressed with the album, but I think it’s actually the most upbeat of the Wilco albums I own. It’s certainly the best album to listen to in the car!

This is my version of the single from the album, titled “Box Full of Letters.” I don’t know what it is about this song — something about the combination of the guitar hooks, lower lead vocal that resonates, and the catchy chorus — but I love it.

And it puts me one step closer to having recorded one song from each album!

Thanks for reading and watching!

See you next session!

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