Song #3

/ robertjames1971 / Leave a comment

First, a picture from last night that has nothing to do with anything you will hear on the audio file…
Untitled

Right, now that that’s out of the way…

 

Now to the song.  Allow me to quote the description I used on alonetone, though I’ve written about all of this before…

Long story…
or, What the hell is a cajon anyway?

I listen to a podcast about cover bands. One of the hosts is a drummer and he plays in an acoustic group. He said he played his cajon at the acoustic gigs. I thought, what the hell is a cajon?

Google informed me that it’s this box thing that you sit on and smack with your hands. There is a hole in it somewhere and even some snares and depending on where you whack it you get a bass drum-ish sound or a snare drum-ish sound. It’s kinda neat.

Fast forward a few months and I’m sitting alone in Epcot center, just outside of Soarin’ (true story) and I was tapping away on GarageBand on my iPhone trying to come up with something different from my usual power trio arrangements. Turns out one of the percussion settings in the drummer function had a cajon. I started thinking like a hippie in a coffee house and thought, cajon, acoustic guitar, and cello. Well, GarageBand’s string sounds are crap and the cello was scratched in it’s place I thought maybe I could dust off my alto sax and use that as the soloist. I hadn’t played my sax since 2013 (I think) and it was time.

Nothing ever became of that Epcot Center song idea, but when RPM 2020 came around I came back to that idea. I decided to make half of my album the usual rock band stuff, and the other half this goofy coffee shoppe thing. If time permits I am going to do a rock band mix of the coffee shoppe songs too, but we’ll see.

This song is about how the US Senate gave the fascist in the white house legal permission to rig elections.

Isn’t that a great story?  I’ve still never seen a cajon in the flesh.

Two Songs, Three Mixes

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First there’s this… A 12-bar blues in the verse and a chunk of a 12-bar blues in the chorus.  This is the only electric song that I didn’t double track the rhythm guitars, but I got to spread out the stereo thanks to running through two amps which is about as awesome as it gets.

Now the screwball part of the post.  This is the first song from the acoustic half of the project.  It’s the only one of the seven that I didn’t put any percussion on (what the hell is a cajon, anyway?) so it’s just two tracks of guitar, two (actually three) tracks of vocals, and one track of sax….

Now here’s the same song with the sax replaced by an electric guitar and bass and drums added.  I call the first mix the Coffee Shoppe Mix, and the second mix the Bar Band Mix although I don’t think I wrote that onto the file name….

….and with that, I have two songs complete.  I just have to decide which version of the acoustic song goes on the final album.