Recently, the British actor, Hugh Laurie (of hit US TV series House fame), made an album of blues music with a whole bunch of well-regarded musicians and singers. Now, Hugh is a very gifted musician and, while not necessarily an outstanding singer, can at the very least hold of tune.
I heard the album playing in the local record shop (or what passes for one around here) and bought it – because of the music, rather than the singing, I should point out.
I brought it back into the office and, as just a few of us were in that day, we played the CD out loud.
My colleagues absolutely tore it to shreds.
According to them, it was not even remotely authentic, it was a cynical piece of self-indulgence, and it was not very good either. I think they were being a bit harsh.
But, I never pass up the opportunity for a comedy song, so I put their criticisms to music. This is a hastily-made recording of it.
The Hugh Laurie Song by DelusionsOfAdequacy
You are too middle-class to sing the blues.
Even though your only aim is to amuse.
You’ll never sound like you’re from the deep south
While that silver spoon sticking out of your mouth
That plummy accent should be reading the news.
You have no right to sing the blues.
Your home is just too fine for you to sing the blues.
That Georgian townhouse, in its secluded London mews.
Your snow white carpets, B&O, that good feng shui,
You’d never catch Robert Johnson using pot pourri.
With your designer bidets in every en suite loo.
You have no right to sing the blues.
You are just too well-fed to sing the blues
The finest Michelin-starred cuisine is yours to choose.
I bet the last time that you tasted famine
Was when Harrods ran out of smoked salmon.
If hunger’s never forced you to eat your own shoes,
You have no right to sing the blues.
Now we’re not saying white men don’t know trouble,
But, Hugh, I really hate to burst your bubble.
The Blues was born of suffering across the Atlantic
And public schoolboy, Oxbridge types are just inauthentic.
So unless you’ve pissed your life away on drugs and booze.
You have no right to sing the blues.
You’re too happy
You have no right to sing the blues.
You’re too rich
You have no right to sing the blues.
You’re well-adjusted
You have no right to sing the blues.
Ain’t.
That.
A.
Bitch!
Showing posts with label songwriting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label songwriting. Show all posts
Friday, 20 May 2011
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
New Music Genre
Yes, you've heard of House Music and Garage Music. Now meet Cardboard Box Music.
This little tune had been kicking around in my head for ages until I finally backed it into a corner and got some words down.
As it's such a simple little thing, I thought I'd try recording it on GarageBand for the iPad - a cut-down version of a program that grown-up Apple Macs have. I think for £2.99, it's not bad.
The vocals and guitar have a very boxy sound to them because they were recorded in a room which is anythng but anechoic. Plus, I suspect that the iPad mic, while doing a fair job, isn't intended for high quality studio recording.
The bass part and the drums were created using the virtual instruments that come with garageBand.
Anyhoo, have a listen to as much of it as you can stand and let me know your thoughts. One thing I think the song lacks is an instrumental section to break things up a bit. Maybe in version 2....
My Name is Mud - Trimmed by DelusionsOfAdequacy
If you can't get the widget to play click here to go to SoundCloud and hear it there.
Don't worry, Watercats, your crown as blogland's premier musos is quite safe.
This little tune had been kicking around in my head for ages until I finally backed it into a corner and got some words down.
As it's such a simple little thing, I thought I'd try recording it on GarageBand for the iPad - a cut-down version of a program that grown-up Apple Macs have. I think for £2.99, it's not bad.
The vocals and guitar have a very boxy sound to them because they were recorded in a room which is anythng but anechoic. Plus, I suspect that the iPad mic, while doing a fair job, isn't intended for high quality studio recording.
The bass part and the drums were created using the virtual instruments that come with garageBand.
Anyhoo, have a listen to as much of it as you can stand and let me know your thoughts. One thing I think the song lacks is an instrumental section to break things up a bit. Maybe in version 2....
My Name is Mud - Trimmed by DelusionsOfAdequacy
If you can't get the widget to play click here to go to SoundCloud and hear it there.
Don't worry, Watercats, your crown as blogland's premier musos is quite safe.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Must the Show Go On? Yes, Apparently.
Followers of Don’t Feed the Pixies will have probably read by now his account of the panto-related shenannigans last Saturday night at a certain village hall near us (You can catch up on it here if you need to).
He spoke eloquently there of the pantomimes staged by our Toastmasters club and another one from some distance away, so I won’t go over all that again. I’ll just add that, not being pretty enough to actually be in the panto (it wasn’t Cinderella, so no ugly sisters needed), I was drafted in at the last minute to do the incredibly difficult and complex job of Lighting Technician. OK, I just had to turn off the stage lights at the proper time and turn them back on again… and then off again…. and then on again. OK, enough of that. That was my one contribution to the panto, big whoop.
No, I was there to form a kind of musical comedy double-act with DFTP. That’s how it ended up anyway. We originally volunteered our miscal services ages ago, but only found out relatively recently how much time we would be allotted. We were, we were told, to be the “middle bit” between the pantos, and needed to come up with 10-15 minutes of material.
What to do, what to do?
We did consider performing a few of our own songs but hadn’t got enough funny to last that long and this was definitely not the occasion for songs about drowning ourselves or feeling p$ssed off at work. We needed funny and we needed it fast - we only had a couple of chances to get together and rehearse before the Big Day.
The we came upon the idea of presenting a series of snippets of famous songs with lyrics re-written to poke gentle fun at Toastmasters and public-speaking – a subject familiar and dear to the hearts of our audience. The theme would be that we had discovered in the Toastmasters’ archive (the bins round the back of the village hall) the lost lyrics of some famous musicians who had once partaken of the Toasties experience. Having got our theme sorted out, our pencils began to scribble furiously and we managed to get something together .
When we came onstage, the running order had been changed. so we were at the end of the two pantos, not the middle. Mind you, this was good as the audience was well warmed up by this time and determined to have a good time.
It was just as well they were!
When we started our skit on Paul Simon’s Sounds of Silence, (Hello, lecturn my old friend/I’ve come to stand up here again…) I managed to somehow mess up one of the chord changes and basically ruined the whole thing so we started over, to much merriment. Sounds of Silence is a b$gger to sing, by the way, with a wide pitch range. My voice was quite tired from practising like a looney earlier in the day in a desparate last-ditch effort to learn the pieces by heart (my sight’s not good enough to read from a cue sheet like lucky old DFTP). Anyway we got though without much further mishap and no vocal collapses, and the audience was having such fun with/at us – even laughing in the right places at the jokes – that we both began to relax a bit.
Then came the lost Cat Stevens song, The First Speech is the Hardest (I had it perfectly planned from the start/But when I stood up it all fell apart…) which we got through without undue boo-boos (or if there were any, my aging brain has blotted them out behind the pink fluffy clouds of pre-senile dementia).
Then it was on to Sting with Every Speech You make (Every speech you make/Every role you take…). According to DFTP, Sting was actually thrown out of Toastmasters for Tantric Speaking – just going on and on and never reaching a climax (bah-dum, ching!). This was one of the few jokes we actually remembered to do on the night. We had roughed out a kind of script and had put (what we thought were) funny little interludes between the songs, but on the night, the applause was very generous and in all the excitement, we forgot most of it. *Sigh* Comedy Gold, lost forever.
Then came the Great Capo Incident of 2010. For those of you who have never used them, Capos are a ingenious device for making your guitar go completely out of tune. Apparently, the inventors originally intended them to just raise the pitch of all the strings, allowing musicians and singers of relatively indifferent accomplishment (like me) to change the key of a song without all that messy business of knowing loads of more complicated and hard-to-play chords. Anyway, I took about 4 goes to get mine fitted properly and DFTP swears his made his guitar sound wonky (although I didn’t notice it). We then went for Bob Marley’s I Joined Toastmasters (to the tune of I Shot the Sherrif) which DFTP, being a much better guitarist than me accompanied really well with a nice reggae beat while I sort of fiddled around a bit, trying to keep up (practeeeeeeesss!!).
Next up was Green Day and Wake Me Up When the Speeches End (the track that never quite made it to their American Idiot album). Again DFTP came up with the goods on the guitar, reproducing quite neatly, the riff that GD play – singing all the while too. Impressive.
Our final hurrah was a song to the tune of I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (the old Coca Cola advert from years ago). This was the longest one and had the least funny in it, but was probably one of the best received for all that. We even got the audience waving their hands in the air at the end, which was terrific!.
This was my first public performance since 1990 and I had been a bit anxious about messing up and forgetting the words. In the end though, it was not too bad and the audience, being so determined to have fun, really made it a lot easier than it might have been. Sadly, no record remains of this performance and perhaps that’s just as well.
DFTP and I are now looking to do some less “safe” venues, like open mic nights or the like. Also available for Weddings, Bar-Mitzvahs….
PS: Watercats have nothing to fear from us!
He spoke eloquently there of the pantomimes staged by our Toastmasters club and another one from some distance away, so I won’t go over all that again. I’ll just add that, not being pretty enough to actually be in the panto (it wasn’t Cinderella, so no ugly sisters needed), I was drafted in at the last minute to do the incredibly difficult and complex job of Lighting Technician. OK, I just had to turn off the stage lights at the proper time and turn them back on again… and then off again…. and then on again. OK, enough of that. That was my one contribution to the panto, big whoop.
No, I was there to form a kind of musical comedy double-act with DFTP. That’s how it ended up anyway. We originally volunteered our miscal services ages ago, but only found out relatively recently how much time we would be allotted. We were, we were told, to be the “middle bit” between the pantos, and needed to come up with 10-15 minutes of material.
What to do, what to do?
We did consider performing a few of our own songs but hadn’t got enough funny to last that long and this was definitely not the occasion for songs about drowning ourselves or feeling p$ssed off at work. We needed funny and we needed it fast - we only had a couple of chances to get together and rehearse before the Big Day.
The we came upon the idea of presenting a series of snippets of famous songs with lyrics re-written to poke gentle fun at Toastmasters and public-speaking – a subject familiar and dear to the hearts of our audience. The theme would be that we had discovered in the Toastmasters’ archive (the bins round the back of the village hall) the lost lyrics of some famous musicians who had once partaken of the Toasties experience. Having got our theme sorted out, our pencils began to scribble furiously and we managed to get something together .
When we came onstage, the running order had been changed. so we were at the end of the two pantos, not the middle. Mind you, this was good as the audience was well warmed up by this time and determined to have a good time.
It was just as well they were!
When we started our skit on Paul Simon’s Sounds of Silence, (Hello, lecturn my old friend/I’ve come to stand up here again…) I managed to somehow mess up one of the chord changes and basically ruined the whole thing so we started over, to much merriment. Sounds of Silence is a b$gger to sing, by the way, with a wide pitch range. My voice was quite tired from practising like a looney earlier in the day in a desparate last-ditch effort to learn the pieces by heart (my sight’s not good enough to read from a cue sheet like lucky old DFTP). Anyway we got though without much further mishap and no vocal collapses, and the audience was having such fun with/at us – even laughing in the right places at the jokes – that we both began to relax a bit.
Then came the lost Cat Stevens song, The First Speech is the Hardest (I had it perfectly planned from the start/But when I stood up it all fell apart…) which we got through without undue boo-boos (or if there were any, my aging brain has blotted them out behind the pink fluffy clouds of pre-senile dementia).
Then it was on to Sting with Every Speech You make (Every speech you make/Every role you take…). According to DFTP, Sting was actually thrown out of Toastmasters for Tantric Speaking – just going on and on and never reaching a climax (bah-dum, ching!). This was one of the few jokes we actually remembered to do on the night. We had roughed out a kind of script and had put (what we thought were) funny little interludes between the songs, but on the night, the applause was very generous and in all the excitement, we forgot most of it. *Sigh* Comedy Gold, lost forever.
Then came the Great Capo Incident of 2010. For those of you who have never used them, Capos are a ingenious device for making your guitar go completely out of tune. Apparently, the inventors originally intended them to just raise the pitch of all the strings, allowing musicians and singers of relatively indifferent accomplishment (like me) to change the key of a song without all that messy business of knowing loads of more complicated and hard-to-play chords. Anyway, I took about 4 goes to get mine fitted properly and DFTP swears his made his guitar sound wonky (although I didn’t notice it). We then went for Bob Marley’s I Joined Toastmasters (to the tune of I Shot the Sherrif) which DFTP, being a much better guitarist than me accompanied really well with a nice reggae beat while I sort of fiddled around a bit, trying to keep up (practeeeeeeesss!!).
Next up was Green Day and Wake Me Up When the Speeches End (the track that never quite made it to their American Idiot album). Again DFTP came up with the goods on the guitar, reproducing quite neatly, the riff that GD play – singing all the while too. Impressive.
Our final hurrah was a song to the tune of I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (the old Coca Cola advert from years ago). This was the longest one and had the least funny in it, but was probably one of the best received for all that. We even got the audience waving their hands in the air at the end, which was terrific!.
This was my first public performance since 1990 and I had been a bit anxious about messing up and forgetting the words. In the end though, it was not too bad and the audience, being so determined to have fun, really made it a lot easier than it might have been. Sadly, no record remains of this performance and perhaps that’s just as well.
DFTP and I are now looking to do some less “safe” venues, like open mic nights or the like. Also available for Weddings, Bar-Mitzvahs….
PS: Watercats have nothing to fear from us!
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Now, where did THAT come from?
Last week, I wrote a song - the first complete one I've managed in ages. Hooray, for me, then. There's a sort of catch, though: it's just about the most depressing thing I've ever written. I have no idea why I wrote it, except that it's winter maybe, and my worklife has changed completely and I miss my old friends or something. I'll try and record it and post it. I'm quite happy. I am. Honest.
Below Bones
I close my eyes
The bubbles rise
And go whirling into black.
The ecstasy
Is filling me
And I am never coming back.
I filled my pockets full of stones
And now I'm sinking below bones.
As if the universe would care
If I am, or am not, there.
The silence here
Makes it so clear
The light above is fading out.
I'm sinking down,
Feels good to drown
All I ever cared about.
The water's cold
But it will hold
The only answer I can see.
The light goes out
So does the doubt
This is the best, the best for me.
Below Bones
I close my eyes
The bubbles rise
And go whirling into black.
The ecstasy
Is filling me
And I am never coming back.
I filled my pockets full of stones
And now I'm sinking below bones.
As if the universe would care
If I am, or am not, there.
The silence here
Makes it so clear
The light above is fading out.
I'm sinking down,
Feels good to drown
All I ever cared about.
The water's cold
But it will hold
The only answer I can see.
The light goes out
So does the doubt
This is the best, the best for me.
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