By Chris Moore:
I recorded this one “last night”!
Okay, too cheesy?
Seriously, this is a simple but fun one from the Traveling Wilburys. A little Tom Petty-esque lead and a special guest tribute to Roy Orbison…
By Jim Fusco:
Oh yeah- welcome to the new and improved Laptop Sessions website! What, you don’t notice a visual difference? Well, great!
The only thing you should notice is how much faster the site is running and will continue to run. Our sitemapt program is chugging away and our site will be running at tip-top shape so we won’t have to turn those short-attention-span visitors away. You know on the Internet crowd only gives you like ten seconds before they get bored and leave. This morning, while we were still on our other server, I waited 26 seconds for the front page to load. Now, at least on my machine, it’s almost instant. And if I want to speed it up even more, I can fully transfer the domain to the new HostGator servers.
On to today’s video!
Chris and I wanted to do this song for so long, but never got a chance until recently. I love this tune, as I do with all the songs off of “Full Moon Fever”, and thought it would be great with that cool chorus riff and the harmonies on the bridge. So, of course, this has quickly become one of my favorite Laptop Sessions acoustic rock cover songs and I hope it’s one of yours, too!
I expect to do most of the songs off of “Full Moon Fever” in the future (except for maybe “Zombie Zoo”) because whenever I hear it, it just sounds like “growing up”. The album came out when I was very little, but we always listened to it in the car alongside the Traveling Wilburys. No “Wheels on the Bus” for us!
And how about Jeff’s video yesterday? Impressive, I must say. His voice was so sweet and it was a really good song, too. I think what I loved about the video the most was the easy-going flow of the song and Jeff’s performance.
You should really check it out! Enjoy the newer, faster Laptop Sessions website, as we continue to bring you an acoustic cover song or original song every single day in 2008 in the quest to solidify our spot as the greatest music video blog of all time!
By Jim Fusco:
Well, who doesn’t know this song? 🙂
This is one of my favorite songs, and has been since it came out when I was just a little boy- slowly becoming a very “long” time ago. Also, “You Got It” stands as one of the great “comeback” songs of all time. Roy Orbison’s career really was over for many, many years due to some sad circumstances, and this song (which, by the way, I’m happy to say he wrote- with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne) brought him back into the limelight. Of course, he’s stay in that light with the success of the Traveling Wilburys right up until his unfortunate passing.
I wasn’t really planning on doing this song for one of my Laptop Sessions cover music videos, but I thought of it one night before a video recording session and decided to give it a whirl. My voice, for some reason, still hasn’t come back completely. I mean, it sounds exactly the same all the time, but at certain times when changing notes, I get a little Justin Hayward-esque “squeak”. I like it in Hayward’s voice, but I don’t like it in my voice, which I’ve always thought of as kinda pure and simple. So, it took a bit of adjusting to make sure my voice didn’t do that squeaky thing. It stinks because I don’t know why it started or how to make it go away. Any home remedies, anyone? I’d be glad to read them.
So, while you sit back and listen to this acoustic cover song from me, Jim Fusco, of this great late-eighties tune from Roy Orbison, I hope you’ll remember Roy’s legacy and that his voice never faltered, right up to the end.
I’ve been very excited about the Laptop Sessions as a whole these past couple of days and the cover video Session-a-day rolls on to the halfway-point in just a couple weeks!
By Jim Fusco: Well, it’s my day again already, huh? 🙂
Seems we’ve bee doing so much promotion between the friend requests, SEO work, and such that it really is getting harder and harder to keep on the “every third day” schedule. And now, we have a Members-Only section on the blog, which will have exclusive, not-on-YouTube, videos. So, that’s even more to do!
I’m hoping with the long weekend that I can record a bunch of Sessions and then focus on promoting what we already have for awhile.
Now, getting on to today’s Laptop Session:
“Congratulations” is a Traveling Wilburys song that my brother Mike and I would always kinda make fun of when we were younger. I mean, the album came out when I was four and my family loved it, so we always listened to it. Plus, when you’re a little kid, Bob Dylan’s incredibly raspy voice is pretty funny.
But, years later, after my 1000th listen, I began to realize that this really is a good song. I think the whole band contributed and the actual tune of the song (stripped of Dylan’s raspiness or not) is great.
The song is sad and emotional, which is probably why they chose Dylan to sing it in the first place, but I thought I would give it a more “pure” treatment.
This was done in one take, so you know I was dead-on. Jeff, Chris, and I are doing a lot more of that lately- partially because of time constraints, but partially because we’re just getting so good at doing this. My skills have been increasing steadily with my view count and subscriber numbers, which are nearing 200 now!
I will meet my goal of 55,000 views by the end of the month and now the only question is: how many more will I get? The Laptop Sessions site is poised for a BOOM in popularity, so stay tuned, as you may have already stumbled upon the Next Big Thing in music!