Good afternoon to you! Welcome to your Tuesday edition of the Laptop Sessions, where we are getting more known each day, especially for our Beatles cover songs.
I bring you a song that has been covered many, many times (did I mention many?). It’s from the Beatles and the classic album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (also a favorite of my music teacher from high school). “With A Little Help From My Friends” is among their most well-known songs, and is also one that Scott & I covered frequently in our jam sessions. However, I usually played the bass to it.
I think I did a good job on this performance, although I sang the backup vocal part at the end, rather than the high note. Other than that this version came out quite well.
Check back tomorrow where Jim will be performing an original song. Have a great rest of the day!
Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, Jeff’s acoustic cover song music videos are no longer on YouTube, but we decided to keep his cover song blog posts up. We figured these music blog entries would be good for posterity’s sake and because Jeff always gave such insightful posts each Session. We hope to see Jeff’s impressive catalog of acoustic rock songs here on the Laptop Sessions cover songs and original music blog again in the future. But, for now, please make sure to check-out hundreds of other acoustic cover songs from all of your favorite bands here on the Laptop Sessions music blog!
Hello and welcome — one and all — to an all-new acoustic rock cover song music video! Yes, it’s a mouthful, but it’s the best way to describe this music blog that you’re viewing. Whether you’re a regular visitor or this is your first time, I hope you’ll see how much work we’ve put into the design, the variety of bands represented, and the quality of content for each post. We don’t just record a video; instead, we write substantive text posts to give you something interesting (we hope!) to read as you listen to the session of the day. Whenever possible, we share information about the band or our individual processes for recording the videos — and we hope that you find the reading worthwhile. We certainly have found these songs worthwhile and devote a lot of time to learning, practicing, recording, and writing about them.
Which brings me to my video for this Saturday session. Today, I picked John Mayer’s “Not Myself,” a great track from his great album Room For Squares. Yes, it may be an over-publicized album (having won many awards and much notoriety when it first came out) and it may be better known for such hits as “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” but it is so much more than these aspects would suggest. I still think this is John Mayer’s best album to date, as it combines great songwriting with great sounds, blending acoustic and electric elements nicely. Possibly my favorite John Mayer song, “Why Georgia,” is on this album, not to mention another close runner up, “Love Song for No One.”
And I’ll always have an odd memory of this album. When I first bought it and started listening to it, I was hooked and couldn’t get enough of it. It gradually became the album that I would listen to in the shower and sing along to, practicing and enjoying singing. Now, this was before I had a portable set of speakers for my iPod, so I would put the CD in my stereo and blast it loud enough to be heard down the hall, in the bathroom, with the water running for the shower. (I obviously only did this when no one else was home.)
So, I was thinking about songs that I really would like to learn and record, and “Not Myself” immediately came to mind. I’ve always liked the structure of the song and the overall mood of the studio recording. I hope I’ve done it justice and that you’ll enjoy listening to it!
Don’t forget to hurry home early, hurry on home (as Warren Zevon would say) for Jeff’s video tomorrow, then hurry even faster for the man, the myth, the legend — Jim Fusco! — on Monday. (And I must assure you that this warm reference to Jim has nothing to do with the fact that he gave me the best birthday present a man like myself could ever hope for — an all-expenses paid set of recording sessions at Fusco-Moore Studios and his creative input as producer on my new album! I’m more excited than I can quite explain in words right now to think about what my songs will sound like with his expertise and creative input, especially based on what his new unreleased music sounds like.)
Welcome to an event so awesome, it can only come once a week – Original Wednesday! Today, I bring you the first Laptop Sessions edition that is covering something from a great album from FMP’s own Masters of the Universe. Their new album is called “Homestead’s Revenge”, available at MoU’s Website.
The song I have chosen to cover is “Evil Disappointment”, written by Mike Fusco. I got the chance to hear the song before the release of the album (well, only two days before), and I get to play drums when we play it live (or better yet, I “let” Jim play the bass!). This song has a great guitar progression, and the strumming style fits the songs’ lyrics and Mike’s writing style to the tee.
Just as Jim and Chris have reviewed my album “Greenlight”, I will be writing a review of this album as well in the near future.
Meanwhile, enjoy this addition to the growing Original Wednesday library here at FMP’s The Laptop Sessions! Stay tuned for another great song from Jim tomorrow, and come back Saturday for another video from America!
Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, Jeff’s acoustic cover song music videos are no longer on YouTube, but we decided to keep his cover song blog posts up. We figured these music blog entries would be good for posterity’s sake and because Jeff always gave such insightful posts each Session. We hope to see Jeff’s impressive catalog of acoustic rock songs here on the Laptop Sessions cover songs and original music blog again in the future. But, for now, please make sure to check-out hundreds of other acoustic cover songs from all of your favorite bands here on the Laptop Sessions music blog!
We’ve all heard the term “deep track,” used to refer to songs that do not receive much (or any) commercial radio airplay. This series is dedicated to going deep into the CD racks to bring you brief but focused reports on ALBUMS that have not received as much commercial or critical attention as they should.
This is an album that seems to get universally hated on. It is Wilco’s first album, released in 1995 following the breakup of the alt.country band Uncle Tupelo. All of Tupelo’s members except Jay Farrar became Wilco and proceeded to record an album of songs that sound very similar to Tupelo’s work with one significant difference — they sound somewhat more together, less raw than your average Uncle Tupelo tracks.
Reception? Well, fans and critics alike appear to have agreed that Jay Farrar’s new band, Son Volt, released a superior debut album. To be fair, I have only heard selected tracks from the Son Volt release and I do understand the inevitability of comparisons between Son Volt and Wilco. Still, I haven’t been overly impressed with what I’ve heard from Son Volt. (Please, send your letters and complaints care of Chris at Laptop Sessions!) Yes, A.M. is a pretty simple rock record. No, songs like “I Must Be High” and “Passenger Side” aren’t going to win any lyrical accolades with lines like “You’re pissed that you missed the very last kiss” and “You’re gonna make me spill my beer if you don’t learn how to steer,” respectively. Even Jeff Tweedy expressed disatisfaction with the straightforwardness of the record, and he was among the first to suggest that this was Wilco “treading some water with a perceived audience.”
Okay, but it’s a fun record! Anyone who is familiar with Wilco’s catalog now knows that, from the second album on, the band became progressively more experimental and interested in making great records. A.M. is breath of fresh rock’n roll air! Not until 2007’s Sky Blue Sky would their sound be as compositionally straightforward again, and as much as I love all the albums in between, isn’t the cliche “variety is the spice of life”? I never skip these tracks when they come up on random and I continue to be drawn in by tracks like the catchy “Box Full of Letters,” the heart-breaking “Should’ve Been in Love,” and the haunting “Dash 7.” (I’m excited that I finally figured out that “Dash 7” refers to, as Wikipedia states, “The de Havilland Canada DHC-7 [airplane], popularly known as the Dash 7.”)
So, contrary to the press it received, I would highly recommend you pick up a copy of A.M. today. It’s not their best album, but who cares? And please, for crying out loud, ignore the genre nonsense altogether — alt.country, country rock, rock’n roll, alternative rock??? — and just enjoy the music!
