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“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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“On For Miles” (Jim Fusco Original Song)

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By Jim Fusco:

Why doesn’t anyone post Original Wednesdays anymore?  Well, I’ll just chalk it up to the fact that my album “Halfway There” came out in April 2009!  If you’ve been to the music video blog before, you’ve probably seen advertisements for it.  You may have even heard a bit.  I hope you’re liking it so far- it’s a loooooong time in the making!  If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably also noticed that we cover almost 200 bands- a new video three times a week.  You may not know that on a weekly basis, we post original songs, as well!

Here is track 3 from the “Halfway There” LP.  On the album, you’ll notice that this song is much punchier and has a more modern sound to it.  Okay, so maybe it doesn’t have a modern sound, but it’s as modern as you’re gonna get from me! 🙂  The song has some cool effects and features a very intricate five part harmony on the chorus- it’s so cool to listen to it in the car because the chorus seems to “widen” the speakers as soon as it kicks in.  It does that on the first chorus of the song “Halfway There”, as well- I’d love to hear your reactions to the album!  I got this effect because of the new mastering techniques I learned.  No longer does it sound like a wet burlap sack is draped over the speakers when listening to a recording of mine.  I’ve actually even remastered my last album, “What About Today?”, in the same way- you should HEAR how much better it sounds!  One of these days, I’ll get a digital copy up on the FMP Store.

Anyway, “On For Miles” is supposed to be “single-worthy” in the sense that it’s the third song on the album, but it does follow two superb ones (if I do say so myself) in “Go Back To Him” and “Our Love Doesn’t Translate”.  I knew I needed to follow-up those songs with something really catchy, as well, but that also got you into the feel of the whole album, rather than listening to a collection of singles.  It’s tough to describe.

So, this version, which is only me and an acoustic guitar, has a much different vibe- but that’s when a cover song on acoustic guitar is really interesting.  It’s never interesting to take a song that was done acoustically in the first place and just do it live in front of the camera.  It’s fun to take a fully-produced song and pare it down to the bare bones and play it just as a “song” and not a production.

I hope you enjoy this original song from “Halfway There”. 🙂

Have a great rest of the week!

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“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (Elton John Cover)

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By Jim Fusco:

Two for the price of one sale today on Jim Fusco videos, as our internet was down on Tuesday, preventing me from posting my all-new acoustic cover song video!  Tonight, I bring you another new artist to the music blog in Elton John.  INCREDIBLE that we haven’t done a song by him yet- ten Pearl Jam songs and not one from EJ?  Yikes!

Anyway, tonight’s song is one that I knew only a certain section of before I truly learned it for my acoustic video.  I knew the “Ah…” part in the song because it’s so catchy.  I must’ve heard it on the radio a bunch of times and that’s what I took away from it.  Listening to the entire song and really paying attention, I noticed that this is truly a great recording.  I LOVE the guitar that come in on the chorus, playing these electric guitar arpeggiated notes.  Heaven!

There’s also some great backing vocals going on during the song- it creates such a lush sound and everyone knows how I love a good backing vocal choir!  My roommate Dana helped me out tonight, as this turned out to be one of his favorite songs- he knew every word and helped me out a TON when it came to the inflection on the singing, especially on the choruses.

This song wasn’t an easy one to play or sing.  But then again, isn’t that what the Laptop Sessions acoustic cover songs music video blog is all about?  We don’t take the easy way out, folks- we challenge ourselves on a daily basis.  Chris, Jeff, and I have held-off playing certain songs for months because we wanted to perfect them.   I still have to hear it from my father every week that I haven’t done “Here Comes the Sun” or “God Only Knows” yet.  But, for those songs, you need to perfect them before debuting them to the world.  And that’s what I plan on doing.

You should’ve seen Dana’s eyes when I told him I was covering this song on acoustic guitar.  I proceeded to tell him, however, that the videos I get the most views on are the ones where people go, “Wait, someone did that song on GUITAR?  I gotta see this.”  Everyone always goes in so skeptical (I get a lot of messages saying, “I thought this would suck, but I was pleasantly surprised!”) and I can understand why- I mean, look at the 99.999% of YouTube cover videos out there that truly do STINK.  But, as we said a long time ago here on the music blog, the goal of the Laptop Sessions is to put an end to bad YouTube covers forever!

I hope you enjoy my rendition- I practiced it about twenty times and made sure everything was correct.  I’m happy to debut Elton John’s music here on the music video blog and hope that Chris and Jeff will decide to tackle some of his songs in the future.  But if I hear Chris singing “Candle in the Wind”, I may have to break his acoustic guitar. 🙂  Until…well…next post…a couple minutes from now…have a great one!

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