Well, it’s that time again… for another Original Wednesday Laptop Session! For today’s installment, I decided to break out a slower song that’s never been released before. I wrote it this summer when my girlfriend and two best friends were out of the country (her in England and them in Italy). They were off on adventures in other countries, and I was still at home, going through everyday life as usual.
Except I was alone most of the time.
For the most part, it was relaxing, as I had just finished my student teaching. But, it was also lonely, and I thought about them often, especially Nicole. Thus, this song kind of came to me as I was practicing another song. It really expresses the feeling of figuring something out about a relationship, but being too distant to share it. Yet.
On a side note, I just found out that Jim, Jeff, and I will be playing two live shows in the coming weeks, so be sure to check http://LaptopSessions for all the details! (Just search “Live Events”)
I hope you enjoy this video and please comment or rate it!
For Bob Dylan / Dead Weather chords & lyrics, CLICK HERE!
By Chris Moore:
Hello and welcome to yet another delay for the “double header” I promised last week or (technically) two weeks ago. But I have a good reason for holding off! Tonight, I’ve recorded “New Pony,” one of my least favorite Bob Dylan songs, because a brand new cover version was released on last week’s Dead Weather debut album.
First, I’ll give a little background on the original version of the song. “New Pony” was first released on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal. To give you a little context here, Dylan had recently released Blood on the Tracks and Desire, arguably two of his best albums. The year 1975 found him fully engaged in the Rolling Thunder Revue along with such artists as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, poet Allen Ginsberg, and others. Although he temporarily revived a different incarnation of the Revue in 1976, this phase of Dylan’s musical career was pretty much over by 1977.
This is not to say that life wasn’t busy for him. This was right around the time that his marriage to Sara Dylan was breaking down and the divorce proceedings began. A lot — perhaps too much — has been written about these personal aspects.
Street Legal was the product of a few weeks of sessions involving a select group of musicians that Dylan had recently worked with. Although his past two albums had met with critical success and his subsequent album, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, would earn him his first Grammy award, Street Legal has generally been lost in the valley between these two peaks.
Personally, I have always liked this album. Sure, the female background singers come across as a bit cheesy at times (have you heard “Baby, Stop Crying”?) and the instrumentation can be a bit much at times, but there are some great songs. “Changing of the Guards” is one of my favorite album openers and boasts a rare fade-in. “Is Your Love in Vain?” and “True Love Tends to Forget” are fantastic Dylan deep cuts. And “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is a narrative wrapped in the best, darkest mood you’ve ever felt. (Jerry Garcia recorded a great version of the latter.)
As for “New Pony”? Well, it generally ranks as one of my least favorite Dylan recordings of all time, and certainly on this record. In fact, it’s the very rare track that I may occasionally skip when listening to the album. Why it was placed in the number 2 slot, I’ll never know.
That being said, let’s flash forward to 2009. Last week, the Dead Weather released their debut album, Horehound. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this group, this is a side project band composed of the White Stripes’ Jack White (drums, some vocals, acoustic guitar on one track), the Kills’ Alison Mosshart (lead vocals), Queens of the Stone Age’s Dead Fertita (guitar, etc.), and Jack Lawrence (bass, etc.). I really liked last year’s Raconteurs album (Jack White and Jack Lawrence’s other side project band), so I figured I would give this one a shot as well.
Long review short, I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be. (My one-sentence review is coming shortly!) That being said, the album certainly has its moments, and for me, one of the best moments is track seven when they cover Dylan’s “New Pony.”
This is an excellent example of a band you wouldn’t necessarily think of as being heavily influenced by Bob Dylan turning around and pulling off a stand-up interpretation of one of his songs. After hearing it, I thought that this song fit better on this album than it did on Street Legal. In that sense, I was happy to assign “New Pony” to a better place in my estimation of Dylan’s catalog of songs.
So, without further ado, I submit to you my acoustic rendition of the song as a send-up to the 1978 Dylan version and a tip of the hat to the brand-new 2009 version by the Dead Weather. I found that I was psyched to learn this ridiculously easy (at least chord-wise) song. Anyone who visits the Laptop Sessions on any regular basis knows that I’m no stranger to a Bob Dylan cover song, but I never thought I’d be recording this one.
Well, at least not until I ran out of all the other ones in 2045 or so…
I hope you enjoy this, and be sure to stop back tomorrow for Jim Fusco’s Tuesday post, a couple days later for Jeff Copperthite’s Thumpin’ Thursday, and later this week for at least one more post from your truly. (I’ve got so much to say about other music and non-music related topics, but I think this is quite enough for one post!)
Thanks for coming to the best acoustic cover song music blog on the Internet! Today, our featured cover is “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” Bob Dylan, believe it or not, is the original songwriter. Who would have guessed? Well, I guess anyone could have…
This song was originally released on Dylan’s early folk album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and it is what you would call a deep track, as it was never a hit, no one that I know of ever covered it for an album, and it never appeared on any live compilations. At least, not official ones. But, regardless of how little attention it has received, I think that it is a perfect candidate for the Laptop Sessions treatment. First, it’s originally acoustic, recorded once as a “live-in-the-studio” recording, which makes it easily translatable to an acoustic cover song. Second, it has a really nostalgic feel to it. By nostalgic, I don’t mean that it sounds like an oldtime song or anything like that. Rather, I mean that it really makes you think about your own “first friends” — those people that you spent your youth with, engaged in simple activities that brought indescribable happiness.
Well, those “first friends” very rarely make it into your future. And while it’s always nice to look back and remember them, it can be very sad to think about the exits they took from your life. Like Bob Dylan, I would pay a good deal of money to go sit “simply in that room again.” But you can never go back…
…you can only write and sing songs like this one that describe the feeling! Another thing I love about the song is that it starts off with the line, “While riding on a train going west…” It gives the feeling of someone nodding off as a train barrels on down the tracks, and as that person just drifts off, these memories of his life come rushing back to him. I think that’s a great way to start the song.
While this is certainly not my first Bob Dylan cover song — it’s one of many Bob Dylan songs I’ve learned and performed — it is one of the few that I haven’t known for years. Many times, when I record a Dylan music video, I just dig back to a song that I used to play all the time and re-learn it. This song was new to my acoustic cover song repetoire, so it was really fun to learn it. And, of course, a little harmonica on a Dylan song goes a long way…
I hope that you’ve been noticing and enjoying all of the changes and additions to the blog these past few days. The home page has been rearranged a bit to make it easier for newcomers and longstanding fans alike to find the band categories and search for their favorite material. In addition, the first seven volumes of the new and improved Laptop Sessions FREE MP3 albums are avaiable in the left column. Finally, last week saw the addition of a truckload of new live music from the Fusco-Moore team. All you need to do now is go to the Fusco-Moore Store and choose which concert you want to listen to — some music is FREE and some is avaiable for a low, low price. I really hope you’ll go over and check it out. We really worked hard to make some quality sets, and it’s interesting to be able to look back now. Well, listen back — there’s no video, but it’s really the sound that matters, right?
That’s it for me for now, but don’t forget to hurry back tomorrow for another all-new acoustic cover song music video from our very own Jeff Copperthite.
After all the Bob Dylan songs I’ve covered, there are still so many essential tracks left to be recorded, and this is one of them. “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” originally recorded by Dylan (with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds) for the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack, has been re-recorded so many times that it’s ridiculous. There are countless live versions, cover versions, and yes, even parodies that are available out there.
And, now there’s a Laptop Session of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”!
This is one of the earliest songs I learned to play on guitar — how can you go wrong with G, D, C and Am? — and it’s one of the first songs I worked out a specific harmonica part for. I haven’t played it in about a year, but it came right back to me. I hope you enjoy it!
Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for another great session from Jeff on guitarbucketlist.com!
