“Man On The Moon” (REM Cover)

By Jeff Copperthite:

Here’s another awesome session for you.  This is a song from REM called “Man on the Moon”.  I’ve covered two songs from this band in the past, and this will make it a hat trick.

This song is from one of my favorite albums by REM called “Automatic for the People”.  This song is a great song that is a tribute to Andy Kaufman.

And, it’s just a coincidence that I had planned on covering REM and Chris had made a REM pun yesterday.  And to think, I’d have to come up with something creative in the pun department…

…maybe next post.  It’s too late for me.

Seeya tomorrow for Jim’s next cover song!

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 origianal 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!

“Losing My Religion” (R.E.M. Cover)

By Jeff Copperthite:

Welcome to your Monday edition of The Laptop Sessions. I’d like to take this opportunity (since everyone reads descriptions) to say hello to another wave of students who have discovered their math/science teacher is on Youtube.

Anyway, todays song is an awesome song from REM called “Losing My Religion”. It’s from their 1991 album “Out of Time” which contains this song among other well known songs such as “Shiny Happy People” and “Radio Song”.

I love this song a lot and always turn it up when it comes on the radio. The video is always an interesting one to watch as well. Few are sure of what the song is about – I think it could be about a forceful religious conversion.

I hope you enjoy this version – even though I sang a slightly incorrect line in the last chorus. I think this version was a great one and I hope you agree!

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 origianal 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!

Reflections on Rock Music: "Alternative" to What? (Part One in a Series of Articles)

PART ONE: “Alternative” to What?

By Chris Moore:

Classifying and categorizing, partitioning and labeling.  As humans, we love to take hold of vast, mysterious expanses and sort through them, putting neat little tags on each of the pieces and placing — sometimes forcing — them together into nicely packaged puzzles.  We call it “studying” and academia has often been dominated by experts who take pleasure in putting their knowledge to good use.

Now, this is certainly not all bad, but it’s certainly not all good.  On the one hand, we need labels to help us understand relevance and form connections across time periods and genres.  It is vital to understand that romantic writers are different from realist writers for a very specific set of reasons, a very specific set of beliefs about human nature and life itself.  This being said, on the other hand, we sometimes get to a point in certain subjects when the labels, tags, and titles become cumbersome.

Rock music, I assert, has become one of those subjects.

If you are a fan of any band and have done any research online, then it should not shock you to learn just how many different genres of music there are.  Indeed, it is not so much that there are too many genres, yet it seems there are too many categories or sub-genres.  I understand there is a clear and necessary distinction between classical music and pop/rock music.  I even understand the need for titles such as “Neo-Classical” and others that serve the purpose of tracking music over a number of decades, even centuries.  However, rock music, for all intents and purposes, has only been around since the 1950s.  In less than sixty years, music critics and rock historians have managed to accumulate quite the catalog of titles by which to…um, catalog…rock music.

Tonight, I’ll tackle the term “alternative” rock.

I love alternative rock.  And, having said that, I must admit that I’m not sure at times what alternative rock actually means or includes.  For instance, the term alternative rock — or alternative music or alt-rock — has come to be used as an umbrella term for a wide range of acts in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond.  Alternative rock has branched out and flowered into dozens and dozens of subgroups.  There’s punk rock, grunge, new wave, and post-punk just to name a few.  I like to think that I’ve done my research and I’ve listened to a wide range of rock music, and yet I have little to no idea of the specific criteria that separate one sub-group from the next.

What I find most interesting — and what I’d like to focus on in the remainder of this article — is the idea of “alternative” rock.  We all know that rock essentially began in the 1950s and 1960s, starting with its roots in folk and country and blues.  (This could, of course, be fodder for an entirely different article!)  After the age of classic performers like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry passed, the age of songwriter performers was ushered in by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and many others.  The seventies unfolded another series of events in rock music history, probably most notably the beginning of the unraveling of the relationship between pop and rock.

Then came the 1980s.  With the eighties came the popularization of technology in music, which we all recognize today in the signature synthesized sounds of many if not most popular eighties singles.  In retrospect, many look back on this and laugh.  The eighties have been the breeding grounds for some hilarious parodies and comedies in the 1990s and even more recently.

That being said, there were some bands in the eighties that wanted to play rock music, and yet they did not seem to fit in to any particular mold.  Take R.E.M. for example.  R.E.M.’s debut album, Murmur, sounds nothing like the popular music of 1983.  Still, as Mitch Easter points out in the liner notes to the re-release of the album, they didn’t necessarily sound like anything that had come before, either.  This is interesting because this alternative rock band chose to play the same instruments that rock musicians had been playing for decades — guitar, bass, and drums.  The basics.  R.E.M. may play the classic instruments, but the overall sound was drastically different from other rock music.  In addition to Peter Buck’s guitar sound, Michael Stipe’s vocals are characteristically difficult to understand on their early work.  This is quite a departure from the multi-layered harmonies and lyric-centered rock of previous decades.  Although they would go on to develop and mature in their style, that first album seems to have set a tone that many look back to as an early marker in the alternative rock music movement.

Since the eighties, more and more bands have sought to create an “alternative” to the norm.  Some bands keep more of the traditional elements than others, and some have more of a respect for the rock of old than others.  This idea of “alternative” really does appeal to me, as I believe it appealed to a great many avid listeners in the 1980s and 1990s.  I came of age in the late nineties, just as alternative music’s hold on the national attention was waning.  Nirvana had come and gone.  Somewhere along the way, “alternative” rock seems to have been born, risen to popularity, and then receded into the background.  I hear some remnants of alt rock in some of the indie and the punk/emo music being made now.  And yet, it feels fractured and insignificant to me.  It truly feels as if I am a man out of time — if only I could have appreciated the music that was being created, recorded, and performed when I was a toddler!

As I scroll through the Wikipedia post on alternative rock music, I find the range of subgenres to be daunting.  There’s Britpop, college, rock, geek rock, gothic rock, noise pop, post-rock, twee pop, alternative metal, industrial rock, and so much more.  I’ll have to check out math rock — that’s one I’d never even heard of!

In my relatively brief time as a consumer of all things rock, I have felt a more and more profound splintering of the genre of rock.  Particularly in the alternative rock category, it feels as if any semblance of unity has been abandoned to a vast multitude of record labels, genre titles, and music magazines.  I wonder if there ever actually was a more unified feel to the alternative music of the 1980s and 1990s, or even of the classic rock of the 1950s and 1960s, but I suppose I’ll never know.

I suppose I can only continue to thumb through the used CD racks and fill in the gaps one album — one song — at a time.

“The One I Love” by R.E.M. – Chords, Tabs, & How to Play

For the acoustic cover song music video, CLICK HERE!

“The One I Love”
R.E.M.

Em                        D                 Em
This one goes out to the one I love.
This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind.
G            D          Am            C
A simple prop to occupy my time…
Em                        D                 Em
This one goes out to the one I love.

Em        D         Em
Fire…
Fire…

This one goes out to the one I love.
This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind.
A simple prop to occupy my time…
This one goes out to the one I love.

Fire…
Fire…

This one goes out to the one I love.
This one goes out to the one I’ve left…  behind.
Another prop has occupied my time.
This one goes out to the one I love.

Fire…
Fire…

** 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. **