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I will be playing at the Valentine's Dinner at the Hot Springs Villa and Restaurant in Harrison Hot Springs on... wait for it... Valentine's Day. As a result, I need to learn how to play some proper love songs.
Here's "Take My Breath Away," a song I clearly remember enjoying as a kid, feeling like it was a good-quality song overall. As a kid, I couldn't hear just how dated the synthesizers were, how oddly repetitive the lyrics were, and just how weird the song was. So I gave it a little bit of a bossa rhythm, which I consider... appropriate.
Here's the original. Berlin have re-recorded it a few times, so it's important to make sure you listen to this official video-version. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't overdub a different version of the song on the "official" video.
Didn't realize that Moroder was a co-writer until I printed it off. Cool, Here's the best Moroder thing:
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I played at the Hot Springs Villa on Saturday night. It felt like an "off night," and I couldn't quite seem to connect to the crowd. But I got at least one OK video out of it.
Here's me singing Roger McGuinn's "On and On."
Here's the orginal.
Also from Saturday night, I shaved my horrendous moustache.
So last night I took my recording stuff to my restaurant gig and recorded a couple videos. Here's what the shows are like.
Half of the recordings below are pretty loop-heavy. But most of last night was taken up playing requests from the audience, sans loops. I still need to get a couple good recordings of some of that sort of stuff.
I play covers at the restaurant because they keep the customers happy. But I hope to sneakily incorporate a few originals over the coming year as my confidence in my own work returns.
While housesitting for my friends in New West, I recorded two little covers for my Under the Covers with Jeff series on my YouTube channel. My friend owns a pretty-great-sounding flamenco guitar so I used it on both of them. 'Tis strange to play an acoustic when you don't usually have one around.
The first one I recorded was Robert Vaughn's "House of my Friends," an obscure little song for which I can't even find the words for on the Internet. I did my best to transcribe them, but I feel like a couple of them "missed." One day, when I track down the No Sense of History CD where I discovered it as a hidden, uncredited track, I'll post that to YouTube so people can hear the thing.
The second song I tried out, a week later, was Leonard Cohen's "Coming Back to You." This gave me a good excuse to properly learn the song's lyrics, which I'd bungled many times before. It's an interesting song because it seems to be one of his most popular songs for people to cover; it even appears twice on the Tower of Song tribute album.
I'm back in Agassiz again, but will spend four more days in Coquitlam trying to teach this ESL camp again. In the meantime I've also booked a gig at a small hotel in Harrison Hot Springs for Saturday night, my first attempt at playing live in a formal way for the last couple years, since I told myself I wasn't going to play solo anymore. I'm a little scared, but hopeful.
And I'll get to see my kids again in a couple weeks! That's the most exciting thing of all.
My family's all broken up. A few days ago, my children moved an 11 hours' drive away, and I'm a bit of a mess. A few hours ago when I heard the phone ring, I literally jumped. In the meantime, I've misplaced my school keys and have absolutely no idea where they are. Clearly, my mind is complete mess and my anxiety's through the roof.
So a couple days ago, while trying to distract myself from my anxiety about their travels, I recorded this weird little cover of Taylor Swift's "Style."
Why "Style?" Because it's a perfect little pop song. It's self-aware in its shallowness and creates tropes where there weren't any before. Its melody is thick and it creates a sort of self-destructive image that makes me think of one of those Tumblr blogs that feature a series of disconnected images that create a singular, ephemeral sentiment.
I don't know when I first heard "Style," but I distinctly remember when it first stood out to me: I was at the Chilliwack Landing pool on one of their $2 Sunday night swims, and the "Take me home" section of the song echoed through the swimming pool, and I thought That's something special. I didn't know it was Taylor Swift, and I only narrowed it down to her a couple months later, when I was walking under some speakers outside a Shopper's Drug Mart and I thought That's really good. Anyhow, I made a video. I probably should have changed the key to something a little more in my range. But I did it and it's done. And Now I need to find some other ways to distract myself from the fact that my kids are so far away. Now where are those keys? |
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January 2019
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Photos used under Creative Commons from Brett Jordan, b r e n t