We’re looking for more Guest Sessions submissions! So, sit down, pull up your acoustic guitar and camera, post the video on YouTube, and CLICK HERE!
It’s finally Friday and it’s time to add yet another guest to this, the Guest Sessions project, hosted at the best cover song and new music video blog on the web — the Laptop Sessions!
For tonight’s video, we are happy to bring you only the second Green Day cover that’s been released on the blog. Tonight’s guest comes to you from Bournemouth, UK. Isn’t that the beauty of the Internet? Mike White, our “Guest” performer, can record a video in the UK and I can post it on this music video blog while sitting in bed in Connecticut, United States. We’ve become so used to this web that it’s not all that amazing to most of us, particularly the younger generation (myself included). I take it for granted sometimes, but every so often I step back and consider how amazing this really is…
Tonight’s selection is “Church on Sunday,” the third track on Green Day’s Warning: album. Warning: was released in 2000 and rose to both gold status and number 4 on the Billboard charts. Even still, this was the least impressive showing the band had ever had, since their debut album Dookie. What makes material from Warning: ideal for the Laptop Sessions, though, is the fact that this album incorporates acoustic elements more than any previous Green Day release.
The band went on to release their new album, 21st Century Breakdown, in May 2009. Supposedly, it has been strongly influenced by the work of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and the Beatles, and is “more power pop than punk.” Interesting… (I hope…)
So, without further ado, Mike White’s energetic performance speaks for itself!
Editor’s note: this post was originally published before December 2015; the exact original date is uncertain.
The Dead Weather’s Sea of Cowards (2010) – MAYBE SO
By Chris Moore:
Sea of Cowards (2010) by the Dead Weather
(May 11, 2010)
Review:
Tighter and yet even more frenetic than their debut, Sea of Cowards is a fast-paced, distortion-drenched hard rock romp through eleven solid tracks, made all the better for the sharing of vocal duties between Alison Mosshart and Jack White: this album is the realization — and only a year later! — of what I had been hoping for when I referred to the great potential expressed in Horehound (2009).
Top Two Tracks:
“Gasoline” & “Blue Blood Blues”
Editor’s note: this post was originally published before December 2015; the exact original date is uncertain.
For Bob Dylan / Dead Weather chords & lyrics, CLICK HERE!
By Chris Moore:
Hello and welcome to yet another delay for the “double header” I promised last week or (technically) two weeks ago. But I have a good reason for holding off! Tonight, I’ve recorded “New Pony,” one of my least favorite Bob Dylan songs, because a brand new cover version was released on last week’s Dead Weather debut album.
First, I’ll give a little background on the original version of the song. “New Pony” was first released on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal. To give you a little context here, Dylan had recently released Blood on the Tracks and Desire, arguably two of his best albums. The year 1975 found him fully engaged in the Rolling Thunder Revue along with such artists as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, poet Allen Ginsberg, and others. Although he temporarily revived a different incarnation of the Revue in 1976, this phase of Dylan’s musical career was pretty much over by 1977.
This is not to say that life wasn’t busy for him. This was right around the time that his marriage to Sara Dylan was breaking down and the divorce proceedings began. A lot — perhaps too much — has been written about these personal aspects.
Street Legal was the product of a few weeks of sessions involving a select group of musicians that Dylan had recently worked with. Although his past two albums had met with critical success and his subsequent album, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, would earn him his first Grammy award, Street Legal has generally been lost in the valley between these two peaks.
Personally, I have always liked this album. Sure, the female background singers come across as a bit cheesy at times (have you heard “Baby, Stop Crying”?) and the instrumentation can be a bit much at times, but there are some great songs. “Changing of the Guards” is one of my favorite album openers and boasts a rare fade-in. “Is Your Love in Vain?” and “True Love Tends to Forget” are fantastic Dylan deep cuts. And “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is a narrative wrapped in the best, darkest mood you’ve ever felt. (Jerry Garcia recorded a great version of the latter.)
As for “New Pony”? Well, it generally ranks as one of my least favorite Dylan recordings of all time, and certainly on this record. In fact, it’s the very rare track that I may occasionally skip when listening to the album. Why it was placed in the number 2 slot, I’ll never know.
That being said, let’s flash forward to 2009. Last week, the Dead Weather released their debut album, Horehound. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this group, this is a side project band composed of the White Stripes’ Jack White (drums, some vocals, acoustic guitar on one track), the Kills’ Alison Mosshart (lead vocals), Queens of the Stone Age’s Dead Fertita (guitar, etc.), and Jack Lawrence (bass, etc.). I really liked last year’s Raconteurs album (Jack White and Jack Lawrence’s other side project band), so I figured I would give this one a shot as well.
Long review short, I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be. (My one-sentence review is coming shortly!) That being said, the album certainly has its moments, and for me, one of the best moments is track seven when they cover Dylan’s “New Pony.”
This is an excellent example of a band you wouldn’t necessarily think of as being heavily influenced by Bob Dylan turning around and pulling off a stand-up interpretation of one of his songs. After hearing it, I thought that this song fit better on this album than it did on Street Legal. In that sense, I was happy to assign “New Pony” to a better place in my estimation of Dylan’s catalog of songs.
So, without further ado, I submit to you my acoustic rendition of the song as a send-up to the 1978 Dylan version and a tip of the hat to the brand-new 2009 version by the Dead Weather. I found that I was psyched to learn this ridiculously easy (at least chord-wise) song. Anyone who visits the Laptop Sessions on any regular basis knows that I’m no stranger to a Bob Dylan cover song, but I never thought I’d be recording this one.
Well, at least not until I ran out of all the other ones in 2045 or so…
I hope you enjoy this! (I’ve got so much to say about other music and non-music related topics, but I think this is quite enough for one post!)
The White Stripes’ “Under Great White Northern Lights” (2010) – MAYBE SO
The White Stripes' "Under Great White Northern Lights" (2010)
(March 16, 2010)
Review:
On their first live album, Jack and Meg White deliver adrenaline-fueled, frenetic performances of some of the best material from their catalog, tearing through each song with a raw energy that displays a simultaneous mastery of and disregard for form.
