Chocolate Jesus

This is a Tom Waits song off of Mule Variations. It's a classic. He sings it through a megaphone - you can check out a video of it on the Tom Waits post I did after we saw him in Jacksonville. At any rate - I noticed the other day that Garageband has a megaphone effect you can put on your voice and this cover was born. Also, I discovered there are "master track" effects that will be put on all the tracks in the song. So I used one of those as well - it's called "Old Movie" and it makes everything just a bit more grainy and lo-fi sounding. So this recording sounds pretty rough - but it's supposed to be that way! Just trying to capture the Tom Waits sound.

Great lyrics by the way - It's about an immaculate confection. I think my favorite line is "Pour him over ice cream for a nice parfait." Good stuff.



[Update: Apparently the blogamp thing doesn't show up in google reader - so most of my recording posts don't make much sense unless you actually visit the blog]

Walking the Cow

This is a Daniel Johnson song. If you don't know who Daniel Johnson is then I highly recommend you check out the documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston but in a nutshell he's a singer-songwriter from Austin, TX who suffers from bi-polar disorder. He's pretty lo-fi and his music is only semi-well known because alternative rock stars like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder have promoted and covered it.

So, as you've probably already guessed, I've covered the Eddie Vedder version. Daniel's version is much more... spastic. Eddie turns it into a really sad, but beautiful, song. I've always been amazed by Eddie's ability to translate a song like this from Daniel Johnston's version to his version. There are a few other covers Pearl Jam does that are like this. You listen to the original and you're like - "how did they hear this?" Not that I dislike Daniel Johnston's version...

At any rate, this one was pretty simple - used my Strat with Garageband's ultra clean settings then it was just a matter of recording the vocal. I still need a better mic but I think this one came out pretty good.



[Update: Apparently the blogamp thing doesn't show up in google reader - so most of my recording posts don't make much sense unless you actually visit the blog]