Back again with another edition of the Laptop Sessions!
This time I finally get to do a Moody Blues song. I just got the urge to do this one yesterday, so it gets first billing. It’s not my favorite of theirs, but it does remind me of listening to it while riding in the car when I was little.
I think it’s got a great beat and a cool chorus (especially how they do the drums in concert), but my father thinks it sounds a bit too much like “Dragging the Line” by Tommy James. I have to agree.
Anyway, this is the first of MANY Moodies songs to come, so stay tuned!
Hi folks! I’ve been pretty down lately about my computer. As I mentioned earlier, my hard drive just died out of nowhere and I’m left with a bare computer that I’m kind of avoiding right now. I haven’t put all the software back on, plus I can’t get the files off of my old hard drive. It’s SOOO frustrating. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to:
Chris and I put up all of the Christmas decorations in the house a couple days ago. We’re hoping to get the tree tomorrow (but since I’m still awake at almost 4 am and we have a party to go to at noon…), and that will complete our decorating. The place looks GREAT! We took video, and I’ll be posting it HOPEFULLY tomorrow with some Christmas music in the background.
I had the day alone today. I spent it working on something (see point #3), but I was also hoping to start working on the MoU Holiday Party 2006 DVD, since I found the master tapes just today. Problem is that I don’t have my video editing program, so I can’t even start putting the tapes into the computer yet! 🙁
Today, I spent most of the day cooking for myself and working on a cover of one of my favorite songs of all time: the Moody Blues’ “The Voice”. I’ve always loved that song, and I just finished making a completely produced version of it, complete with synthesizers. I can’t believe how great it sounds and I’ll hopefully be mixing it tomorrow and putting it online as a FREE download at the Fusco-Moore Store!
New Laptop Sessions will be coming soon. I just have been so upset about losing all the sessions I had done just before it crashed, I haven’t really gotten up the gaul to just do them again. I hope I get my stuff back…
We’re planning the Fusco-Moore Christmas Party (search in the side bar to the right for the old post with the info.) and we hope it’ll be a success. Let us know (by leaving a comment) if you can make it!
I hope everyone’s having a great Christmastime and I promise we’ll be back to 100% soon! ~Jim
Well, I’m finally back up and (sorta) running again after almost a week without my laptop! The hard drive just crashed out of nowhere with no chance to recover my files. So, I got a new (bigger) hard drive and I hope everything will run smoothly from now on. I tell you, though- I bought Apple products for their reliability, but the hardware hasn’t always been kind to me. I just thought that quality hardware was the reason for the high prices. I guess you don’t always get what you pay for. In my opinion, it’s still better than Windows because a Windows machine will still die on you, but it’ll be even more difficult to work with when it’s still alive.
This song goes out as a request. “The Lonely Sea” by the Beach Boys is a great early tune that doesn’t get much credit because it wasn’t a single. But, Beach Boys fans know (and love) this song. I think it’s a good one to do solo because even though the Boys had background “oohs”, this was a Brian Wilson song through and through. A great chord progression goes along with this song- simple, but powerful. As I mentioned in a previous post, Brian Wilson always had a knack at coming up with a great chord progression. This song is surprisingly dark sounding for a song written by a guy in his early twenties.
Of course, “The Lonely Sea” is one of those songs that really sounds like a period piece. What I mean by that is, you can tell this song was done before the Beatles became popular in America. Songs from the early 60s and late 50s had breaks in the middle where the lead singer would just speak a few lines. Most notably, you can hear that in the Elvis Presley song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”. It’s a great song, but you can tell the era in which it was recorded/popular. “The Lonely Sea” probably wouldn’t have sounded the same even two years later, once the Beatles changed the sound of popular music forever. The Beatles had a way of setting trends. I will always admit to that. Brian Wilson, though, had a way of pushing the envelope, musically. He didn’t necessarily change his style all the time, but he was working on perfecting his songwriting style the whole time. He would add different instruments and experiment with different chord progressions and harmony parts. It was happening from the start- songs like “The Lonely Sea” can be written off as a teenage love-sick song, but it’s got a sound that you just didn’t hear on the rest of the “teenage” music in the early 60s. And, you especially didn’t hear it from surf music groups, like the Beach Boys music was labeled.
I hope everyone’s been enjoying the Laptop Sessions and will continue to tune in every day for more acoustic cover songs here on the best music blog on the Internet! There will be plenty more Beach Boys cover songs to come.
Here’s my second entry for “Original Wednesday” here on the Laptop Sessions. By the way, did you notice we now have www.guitarbucketlist.com? Give it a look!
“Marie” has always been one of my favorite Chris Moore songs.
Every time we play this in concert (which has been MANY times), I always look forward to it. Of course, this version is without the dueling harmonica and guitar solos, but I think the song stands up on its own (the mantra of the Laptop Sessions).
Chris always thought of this song as an experiment for him because he had never really written a love song before quite like this. Truly, when he wrote it, he didn’t even have any real inspiration. But, Chris is a professional writer and this song shows that he didn’t need a real “Marie” to show he could feel this way.
In concert I’ve previously done a very slow version of this song. But for the Laptop Sessions version, I wanted to keep it true to the original- the one I heard in the background on Chris’ car CD player that really started it all. Once I heard this song, we started to think that a band might be possible. See http://jimfusco.com/albums.html for the rest of the story…
I hope you enjoy part 1 of my Original Wednesday installment.
