Hello and welcome to this weekend edition of the Laptop Sessions video blog! Today’s acoustic cover song is from the Foo Fighters, a band that my fellow songwriter Jeff Copperthite has covered several times before. I’ve only gotten into this music within the past few months, after a faithful YouTube viewer and fan of the Laptop Sessions requested that I cover the Foo Fighters song “Everlong.” I went out to the store, bought the album The Colour and the Shape, and immediately got into it. For those of you who don’t know me, you need to understand that I’m a big fan of well-packaged CD’s, and this was the 10th anniversary remix with a nice, lengthy booklet and a shiny cover. Now, this may have coloured (pun intended) my perception of it, but what I really liked about the album was its overall progression. It begins with an electric guitar and Dave Grohl’s subdued vocals on “Doll,” a song that gradually builds up and suddenly ends after about a minute and a half. The next song, “Monkey Wrench,” is pure energy and rock’n’roll. The album continues to rev up and slow down and vary as it goes. Previously to this, I had only heard their In Your Honor album. I love the concept — one disc of electric songs, one of acoustic music — but I found it unremarkable.
I haven’t quite perfected my version of “Everlong,” but this is another great track from the album to tide you over while I practice that one. “Hey, Johnny Park!” is a title that I have yet to understand — Foo Fighters fans please help by commenting here!! — and it certainly made me stretch my range a bit, but I love the guitar intro/riff and it really translated pretty well as an acoustic cover song, as the other Foo Fighters covers by Jeff did.
Without further ado, here’s your official Saturday Laptop Session — don’t forget to check out the Laptop Sessions archive for more quality Copperthite covers…
Laptop Sessions Historian UpdateOn the day 6 years after he recorded this song, Jeff has reuploaded it to his Youtube channel and it is now available for your viewing pleasure or displeasure (hopefully pleasure). Enjoy!
Welcome, for the first time in 6 weeks, to Thumpin’ Thursday! That’s right, after a brief hiatus for an awesome acoustic cover song by Mike, I am back for my regularly scheduled Thursday video. I’ve got a short but awesome one for you today.
One of my favorite albums in my teenage years was the album “Foo Fighters” by the band of the same name. At the time, I listened to this album countless times. I can probably play most of the songs on the album and the lyrics are easy to recall. The song I have chosen is “Big Me”, which was a single from the album. You may recall the music video (yeah, like MTV plays music videos anymore – they used too) is a spoof of old Mentos’ commercials. I’m sure you can find it on Youtube on countless users’ channels.
I usually don’t record short songs, but my next video will be a slightly longer song, and could be a new band as well! You’ll have to wait and see.
Come back for more great Laptop Sessions covers. Jim will wow us again.
Hello and welcome to another week of new music and material, brought to you by the best acoustic cover song music video this side of the Alpha Quadrant! (That’s a little Star Trek: Voyager reference for those of you nerds out there…)
For my song tonight, I’ve chosen my first Radiohead cover. How did I get to this song? Well, I’ve been listening non-stop to A Singer Must Die, Steven Page’s collaboration with the Art of Time Ensemble. The final track on that album is a cover of Radiohead’s song “Paranoid Android.” That song is from their 1997 album OK Computer. Listening to that album today, I came across “Exit Music (For A Film),” a great little track that has a strong acoustic foundation.
And, after all, I realized that Jeff is the only contributor to the blog who has recorded a Radiohead track, and all four of his selections are from their album The Bends. Now, I’ve never heard The Bends, but of the albums I’ve heard, my favorite has always been OK Computer.
What better reason to pull out a track from that release for tonight’s video?
The other story behind tonight’s session is that I had originally planned to cover a song in honor of the final edition of the Johnny Cash “American” series, American VI: Ain’t No Grave, which comes out tomorrow. I would have loved to record Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day,” but I couldn’t work out an arrangment I was happy with. The only other song I was halfway interested in taking on was Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times.” I had learned, practiced, and planned to record it until I got home and realized I was too bored by it. It would have been an extremely simple song to record — easy chords, basic country structure, etc.
But what fun would that be?
So, I kept coming back to Radiohead and the fact that we’ve never recorded a cover from the classic OK Computer. Figuring out the chords for “Exit Music” was more difficult than “For the Good Times.” I found a couple different versions online, and what confused me most was how both sets that I found began with the same couple chords but then varied wildly. In some cases, the first was accurate. In others, the second was accurate. In others, neither were accurate. In the end, that was half the fun of this session: I feel like I got acquainted with the song through having to figure it out, so I felt a lot more passionately about recording it.
I suppose I’ll just have to wait for Johnny Cash’s versions of “Redemption Day” and “For the Good Times”…
Going back to the reason I started listening to Radiohead today in the first place, I wanted to repeat that I have been enjoying Steven Page’s A Singer Must Die much more than I initially thought I would. When I first learned of this release, the prospect of an album of covers performed with an ensemble did not appeal to me in the slightest. As time went on, I became more and more interested to hear what it sounded like. Although I couldn’t bring myself to pay for the shipping that it would have taken to get a physical, autographed copy, I had assumed that Newbury Comics would be stocking it. Then, last Tuesday, I was shocked to learn that it wasn’t available at any retailer in the U.S., nor was it available on iTunes. I thought I would have to wait…
…that is, until Steven Page tweeted the link to his online store that had just added the digital version of the album. As you can read in my review (CLICK HERE!), I found the choice of songs, the performances, and the arrangment of tracks to be outstanding. To be fair, it’s not an album I’ll be cranking up in my car, but it is certainly an album that has and will continue to get a lot of air time at home. The most exciting part about this week’s edition of the Weekend Review is the endorsement it was given. After I wrote and posted the review yesterday, I also posted a tweet with a link so that people who follow me could read it. Then, Mike retweeted my post and added Steven Page (@stevenpage). Finally — and this is the exciting part — Steven Page actually retweeted Mike’s post! So, in summary, Mike and I both managed to be retweeted by, as I wrote in my text to Mike, STEVEN FRICKIN’ PAGE!!! In all seriousness, I was thrilled that he took the review seriously enough to retweet it, and I was happy to see the increased traffic on the page for yesterday and today.
As a final, non-music related note, I spent my first hour and a half after school today camped out in the living room with snacks and season five episodes of The Office. The reason? Not just because I’m lazy, although that was probably a contributing factor. No, it had to do with the stench coming from my dishwasher. There’s some kind of issue with the pipes or the dishwasher itself, and nothing I did seemed to help the smell. So, after retreating for a while and feeling a bit depressed about the whole situation, I got excited about this session, which revived me. Then, Nicole came home from her class with some advice from her father. Fifteen minutes later, problem solved! At least for now, as this will only work permanently if it’s an issue with the pipes. If it’s the actual dishwasher, then I’ll probably return home today (or, at the latest, when I run the dishwasher next weekend) to a not so pleasant odor.
I’m not sure why I felt the need to share that, other than the fact that it is a great example of the power of the Laptop Sessions — they have the power to ruin a night (computer issues, multiple takes, etc.), or to revive your day.
And, with that, I hope you have a great week, keep checking back for new material this week, and I’ll see you next session!
Welcome everyone to the first new Jim Fusco Laptop Sessions cover song video for over a year and a half! I can’t believe it- doesn’t feel like that long ago AT ALL. The last cover video I did was “What Am I Doing Hanging ‘Round” by the Monkees on February 7th of 2013. Yikes.
As all fans of the music blog know, I’m releasing a new album called “The Easy Ways” in September! It’s been the spark I needed to get back into recording more Laptop Sessions cover song videos. I’ve compiled an incredible list of songs over the past 18 months and I can’t wait to get back into the full swing of it. I’ll even be re-recording some of my older videos. Yes, even I messed-up now and again, so I’m going to finally fix those mistakes and make the videos the best they can be. I went back and listened to over 220 cover song videos I’ve done in the past and only found 14 that need to be redone. That’s not so bad! I may do a few others that were poorly lit (or when I didn’t shave, was in my pajamas, etc.), as well.
Speaking of lighting, I’m still trying to perfect it, but I’ve got a new lighting kit to go along with my new video recording process. I’m now recording on my new iPad (should we change it to the “Tablet Sessions”?) with my trusty ZOOM H2 microphone. I”m also doing the video editing on the iPad. It’s so much faster and easier, but I’ve noticed a lot of features are lost on the watered-down mobile version. Thankfully I’ve found workarounds for the issues I’ve found so far. I hope there are updates to the app in the future that will allow me to enhance the colors in the video and normalize the audio better.
But these first few videos I’m doing came out pretty good and they took less than a quarter of the time it used to take me to record. And that’s the biggest part- I’ll do many more videos if they’re easy to create. That’s what was great about the Laptop Sessions in the first place: I could just open the laptop and hit record. But now, I’ve got to light it properly, have a nice background, and even comb my hair! I’ve noticed that people really like seeing a nicely lit frame with my electric guitars in the background and I think some of my older videos don’t get viewed much anymore because of their poor video quality.
So now, onto today’s video:
“Suspicious Minds” is a song by Elvis Presley that he debuted around the time of his big comeback special in 1968. I really need to see that video- I heard he really knocked it out of the park. Isn’t it so sad that the man was only in his early thirties and he already had to make a “comeback”? That’s show-business, I guess. Anyway, the song was a big hit for Elvis and it’s been a song I’ve known and loved for just about my whole life. It’s a fun one to sing, too, as it has some real passion in that slower middle section. I hope I did the song justice!
Stay tuned for an original song in a future Original Wednesday post. I’ll be alternating original songs and cover songs. In the meantime, you should be checking out http://jimfusco.com for previews of some of my new songs, plus the album cover artwork that will blow you away! Enjoy “Suspicious Minds”, originally done by Elvis Presley!
