A D Bm
I thought I saw you in The Battleship but it was only a lookalike.
She was nothing but a vision trick under the warning light.
Bm F#m A F#m
She was close, close enough to be your ghost,
F#m A
But my chances turned to toast when I
D Bm A
asked her if I could call you her name.
I thought I saw you in The Rusty Hook, huddled up in a wicker chair.
I wandered over for a closer look and kissed whoever was sitting there.
She was close and she held me very tightly until I asked awfully politely,
“Please can I call you her name?”
D Bm
I elongated my lift home.
F#m D
I let him go the long way round.
Bm E
I smelt your scent on the seat belt and kept my short cuts to myself.
I thought I saw you in The Parrot’s Beak messing with the smoke alarm.
It was too loud for me to hear her speak and she had a broken arm.
It was close, so close that the walls were wet,
And she wrote it out in Letraset,
D Bm C#m
“No, you can’t call me her name.”
A C#m
Tell me where’s your hiding place?
A C#m
I’m worried I’ll forget your face.
F#m
I’ve asked everyone;
Bm E
I’m beginning to think I imagined you all along…
D Bm
I elongated my lift home.
F#m D
I let him go the long way round.
Bm Dm
I smelt your scent on the seat belt and kept my short cuts to myself.
SOLO: (A D – Bm) x2
F#m Bm
D E
I saw your sister in The Cornerstone on the phone to the middle man.
When I saw that she was on her own I thought she might understand.
She was close, well you couldn’t get much closer;
She said, “I’m really not supposed to,
but yes, you can call me anything you want.”
** These chords and lyrics are interpretations and transcriptions, respectively, and are the sole property of the copyright holder(s). They are posted on this website free of charge for no profit for the purpose of study and commentary, as allowed for under the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law, and should only be used for such personal and/or academic work. **
[Editor’s Note: We received this video from the performer’s daughter a few days ago, and it seemed like the perfect note on which to kick off a new season of Guest Sessions videos on the Laptop Sessions blog. The LS Blog was originally founded by one man with a guitar, a laptop, and a living room as his stage. Over 600 music videos, hundreds of music reviews, and dozens of special features later, the Laptop Sessions continues to be a source for quality commentary on music. After all, what is a cover song if not an attempt to interact with and add ourselves into the conversation about our favorite original music? So, check out the video below!]
A note from his daughter, Jordane:
My papa singing and playing guitar to one of his favourite songs. I feel like it shouldn’t just be me admiring his talent in his living room, but I feel other people from all around the world should admire him too. Please enjoy!
Well, it’s been a while since I posted a music video, so I figured I’d better make certain my YouTube account was still functional…
This week, instead of recording a cover song, I felt that it was time to kick off The 2010 Project music video series I’ve been planning for a while. You may be wondering, what exactly is The 2010 Project? It is the working title — and, based on a recent conversation, very possibly the official title — of my forthcoming album.
Thus far, as of April break, I’ve chosen the thirteen songs that I plan to record and completed the writing of both music and lyrics. Since then, I’ve recorded acoustic demos of each song and begun listening them in order to help me think of and decide on arrangements and various aspects of how I’d like the final products to sound. I’ve been experimenting with GarageBand drum loops, and I’ve been practicing the songs quite a bit since April. Every weekend since then, I’ve taken an hour to sit down and play through the album in order.
As with any big project like recording an album’s worth of material, anything’s liable to change by the time the final product is ready to be heard. That being said, I plan to string together thirteen installments in this music video series, each featuring one of the aforementioned songs. And, understanding that anything can change, I’ll be releasing them here on the blog in the order I plan to sequence them on the album.
The first song up is “No Lights, No Sound.” Laptop Sessions regulars may recognize this as a video I’ve already recorded and posted over a year ago. However, this is the finalized version, with some slight lyric changes and additional verses. This song is a rare case of old lyrics re-emerging on a new song. The story here is that, a few months ago, I came across the lyrics for an old song that I never really committed to, but had always liked a few lines from. I thought they might fit nicely into this song, and with a few alterations, I think they do.
In a lot of ways, this is one of the simplest songs on the list, a tune that started as I walked around my room in the dark almost two years ago. I was home alone, my capo on the second fret from having played another song (which I’ve since forgotten), and the first line sort of came to me: “The lights are off; there’s no one around…” I wrote this and the first chorus, but that was it for a while. It wasn’t until months later that I added the middle section and new verses. Then, this past April, I deleted a verse and added two more in.
“No Lights, No Sound” is a song that has weathered several phases in my recent life, a track that has been conceived, shaped, and reshaped by these phases and survives in its current form with a scheduled slot as the opening track of The 2010 Project.
I hope you like this one. For some reason, even though my allergies haven’t been hitting me as hard as they probably will soon, my voice wasn’t at its peak today. That being said, I feel that worked for this solo acoustic performance.
So, without further ado, here is the first installment in the series — hurry back every day this week and both days of the weekend for new posts!
So, in the middle of the second biggest, busiest weekend of my semester, I decided to record a Laptop Session. A couple years ago, this would have been no surprise, but it’s been a long time since the “session-a-day” workaholic’s regime ruled this blog.
July 26th.
That’s the date I posted my last acoustic cover song music video. I’ve recorded performances of original songs since then, but it’s been since before the premiere of Steven Page’s “Indecision” that I posted a true Laptop Session.
Back in July, I had based my cover on an acoustic performance by Page that a fan had posted on YouTube. That pretty much sums up my working philosophy concerning covers: I’m not on a schedule so much as I’m waiting for the interest to strike. Of course, I keep plenty busy in between writing music reviews and publishing playlists, as well as facilitating the Guest Sessions division of the blog, and I’m happier about my work here than I’ve been in a long time.
Still, there was an appeal to those days when cover songs were the sole focus of our efforts, and we were excited about expanding our repertoires at a breakneck pace.
That being said, I’ve learned fairly recently that the past is a nice place to think about and even visit, but I wouldn’t want to stay.
Today’s session is born out of how pleasantly surprised I was to find how much I like the Goo Goo Dolls’ early nineties work. I’ve been a fan of the band since I first heard “Iris” on the KISS 95.7 morning radio show in early 1998. I remember saving up my allowance so I could pick up the song the next time my parents took us out to the mall. This being before I understood and appreciated albums, I picked up the first CD I could find with “Iris”: the City of Angels soundtrack. (If I remember correctly, Dizzy Up the Girl hadn’t been released yet.) This wasn’t a complete loss, as this is the disc that introduced me to other great songs like Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House,” Eric Clapton’s “Further On Up the Road,” and one of the few U2 songs I truly love, “If God Will Send His Angels.”
Needless to say, I fell even more in love with “Slide” when that was released as the follow-up single. Looking back, I took this time period entirely for granted: excellent rock bands like the Goo Goo Dolls were on the radio all the time and their music videos were being played — sometimes at full length (gasp!) — on MTV. To this day, I can’t listen to “Iris” without imagining clips from the video, like in the tower or under the over pass.
At the end of the day, though, I’ve always felt Dizzy Up the Girl to be an okay album and not much more. There are some outstanding songs — “Broadway” became and remains my favorite song from the album and “Acoustic #3” is utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful — but there are also a handful of “okay’s” and throwaways. Compared to other albums I was listening to at the time — BnL’s Stunt and Matchbox20’s Yourself or Someone Like You — Dizzy Up the Girl took a back burner, and I never bought a follow-up album. By the time I was old enough to know about and be interested in back catalogs, I had left the Goo Goo Dolls behind.
Fast forward to 2010. Something For the Rest of Us is released, and interestingly, my review of Dizzy Up the Girl could be duplicated here, with only the specific song titles needing to be changed. (For the record, “Still Your Song” is in the running for my favorite GGD song and there are others, like “Sweetest Lie,” that I love.) My friend Mike kept singing the praises of this new album, so I gave it another chance (thus falling in love with the aforementioned songs that I hadn’t paid more than one listen), but the result still falls flat in comparison with his enthusiasm.
Then, Mike, my girlfriend Nicole, and I saw the Goo Goo Dolls in concert.
Several songs into the setlist, something clicked. I finally “get” the Goo Goo Dolls. Unlike Third Eye Blind (another late nineties favorite of mine that promptly faded from my radar when I “got” them and consequently got bored), the Goo Goo Dolls have such depth and energy that I had partially forgotten and partially missed. So, I set out to find albums from their back catalog. The first two I’ve been able to find are 1995’s A Boy Named Goo (discussion of which I will reserve for a future post) and 1990’s Hold Me Up. The latter is such a boneheaded album filled with boneheaded little rock songs like “Laughing,” but I loved it instantly. Almost immediately, I began singing a quieter version of “Laughing” to myself, eventually figured out the chords, and have played it now and then over the past week. Finally, I got the urge to record it today and voila!
It should be noted that I’m rusty and the consequences are as follows: I didn’t comb my hair, I didn’t think to hook up my new USB microphone that I’ve been using to mic sessions for my new album, and I absentmindedly dragged over the nearest item that would hold my cheat sheet at the proper level. The results? I look disheveled, it’s harder to hear me than it should be, and I smelled the vague whiff of cat poop throughout my two takes (turns out the aforementioned item is the cat’s poop bin, moved into the spare room while the bathroom is being worked on).
So, without further ado — and there’s been much ado, many parentheticals, and a slew of sidebars — I bring you my first authentic Laptop Session in over four months. My acoustic arrangement is certain to drum up a compliment or two and a much greater number of grammatically nonsensical rants about my talent (or lack thereof) and sexual orientation, but that’s the only way to know I’m back on the blog!
