I made this cover song for my housemate, the esteemed Kyle Mabson, who came out of his room a couple of weeks ago and announced that he was going to use Facebook to solicit covers and remixes of Gotye’s #1 super-hit single “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which sounds like Sting singing over Manu Chao.
My version is kind of country but also kind of “not country.” There are some airhorns and distorted guitars too. I also used the Latin beats MIDI preset on my computer, to make sure that it would be Geiswave. Dalton Blanco sang the Kimbra part and he really kicked its ass.
In total, 26 artists submitted tracks to Kyle’s mix! You can, and should, get the whole thing on Bandcamp! There are so many cool jams on here.
Wow, I’m really excited about this one. Home Room is one of my favorite spots in town, and I’m playing with groups I really admire!
Body Parts is headlining the show and will be debuting the video for their song “Doing Things.” In celebration, they’ll playing an acoustic set rather than an electric one. Everything Body Parts does seems so meticulously crafted (their debut album is even called “On Purpose”), so I’m interested to see how they translate their tunes without electricity. I’m confident that it’ll be excellent.
Joining us on the bill is Norse Horse, a relentlessly-catchy guitar driven project that last year released the excellent Grids EP on Family Time Records.
Opening the show is iloilo, a project from ex-members of Pek Pek. This is their first show, and I couldn’t figure out how to embed their tracks, but they sound good! Lots of hazy, hypnotic acoustic guitars and reverb-drenched mystery.
Home Room is located at 3121 Beverly Blvd, in that area of town that could alternately be called “South Silverlake” or “North Koreatown.” The show starts at 9PM, and I go on second. It’s all ages and $5.
Boy, do I ever love Tom Petty. During the summer between fifth and sixth grade, it was a chance encounter with the “Into the Great Wide Open” that first inspired me to start paying attention to pop music. That led to a blossoming over the summer of ’94 and my discovery of groups like Nirvana, R.E.M., Beck, and Green Day. But while I loved “alternative music,” Tom Petty was my favorite. I had three of his albums before I had any albums by anyone else.
One of my earliest vinyl LPs was the band’s self-titled debut from 1976 — the one that’s got a picture of Tom smirking and wearing a bullet belt over his shoulder. That album, along with a story I read in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock N Roll about how the band withheld the masters of the Hard Promises LP in a game of high-stakes brinksmanship with MCA over sticker price, was the proof that I used when my friends who liked Green Day and the Offspring called me a “poser” for liking Tom Petty so much. Bullets and a smirk are pretty punk, and so are the rockabilly grooves and odes to teenaged abandon on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “Into the Great Wide Open” may have introduced me to Tom Petty, but it was this album that made the long-term impact on my taste.
So, here’s a cover of “Rockin’ Around with You,” the first song from that album. I recorded it a couple of weeks ago with the indescribably fabulous Sarah Cisco, my love and a damned fine musician who will hopefully continue to share her talents with the world. Sarah sang with me, and I did the drum machines, guitars, bass, and synth parts. It’s a pretty straightforward, shuffling jam that doesn’t stray too far from the original.
Okay, so last week I regaled you with the illustrated story of So Many Wizards’ trip to the UK in March. Now, I bring the jams.
Much of the time on tour was spent in our van, which was ably piloted by Dave Buck of Bare Necessities Tours. While riding, we came up with an “Exquisite Corpse“-style game to pass the time. It went like this: one of us would make a beat and a simple melody using the iPad, and then that person would pass it to another person who’d layer a part over it, then pass it to another person, and another person, and so forth until we’d completed the circle. We ended up making five of these jams, which I present here.
In addition to the four members of So Many Wizards (Erik Felix, Nima Kazerouni, Frank Maston, and myself), these tracks include contributions from our good friend and videographer Sergio Munoz, Jr.:
Making these tracks was a special bonding experience. Just look at how excited Nima is as he builds his first loop!
We call this EP “Play ‘Fly a Kite!’”because people keep yelling that at us when we play shows back in the States.
We decided to call the project Geordie Shore because… well, DUH…
My former band, Pizza!, just released an album called We Come from the Swamp via Bandcamp. You can pay for it if you’d like, or you can download the whole thing for free. I think that it’s got quite a few really great jams on it. Here it is:
Last month, I went on tour to Britain with So Many Wizards. It was fun!
We saw this guy rocking hard in the London Underground on our first night. I didn’t realize that he was missing a limb when I started videoing him.
The next day, we played our first show. Before we could play, we had to rent an amplifier using the Internet. We tried finding one on Facebook first, but we failed.
The Mexican food section at Sainsbury’s was predictably poor.
My favorite band of the trip was Brilliant Mind. We played with them at our second show, in Newcastle.
In Edinburgh, I saw a man playing with fire in the street.
Erik “changed over” at midnight in Edinburgh.
There was a Taco Bell at the mall in Manchester. We all decided to go because we’re all such fourth meal fanatics. Sadly, Taco Bell isn’t the same in Britain. My burrito was folded like an envelope, and the cheese was sharp cheddar! Everyone who ate the meat said that it tasted funny, but I think the beans were pretty normal. After that, Sergio and Nima decided to get apple pies at McDonald’s and it took a really long time. I didn’t get a picture of that.
After Taco Bell, we played a show. Sergio made a video of our soundcheck before that show. Boy, he can sure hold a camera steady!
Erik had a good birthday. That night, we went to a fast food restaurant and he was in such a good mood that he ate rice left behind by another customer. This video is from that night. We never drove.
In Leeds, Frank danced to R. Kelly.
I saw this sign in Liverpool.
This bird was hanging around near the “Elderly Crossing” sign. The seagull, not the fiddle-shaped bass guitar, is the official symbol of Liverpool.
Frank and I agreed that this was an example of “Too Much Information.”
The sleeping arrangements in Liverpool were not ideal. I had a hard time snoozing, but Erik, Frank, and Dave did just fine.
I saw this pink sparkly donut at a gas station when we were on our way to the airport on our last night. It reminded me of Sarah so I took a picture of it.
This weekend, I made music using my old Tascam cassette four-track from years ago. I hadn’t used it in a while, so I thought it would be fun to experiment.
I created this track semi-randomly. I played the music live using Garageband running on my Ipad synced in a “Jam Session” with Garageband running on my iPod touch. I sent the iPad’s signal through an MXR Carbon Copy pedal followed by a Boss Harmonizer, and I sent the Ipod through a Boss Loop Station RC-2. On top of that, I layered an infomercial for Human Growth Hormone that happened to be playing on 870 AM. The radio signal was also sent through the Carbon Copy and Harmonizer pedals.
My debit card has had the expiration date of March 2012 for as long as I can remember, which has made it seem like kind of a milestone for years even though I’ve not had any reason to think of the month as anything particularly special. It seemed very distant once, but like all expiration dates it’s now come and will soon pass. Hopefully my bank will remember to send me a new one.
Oh, but in the meantime March 2012 actually became a real milestone. Thanks to So Many Wizards, I’ll be in the United Kingdom next week participating in my first overseas tour. Immediately after that, we’ll be at South by Southwest. We’re really excited to be supporting “Lose Your Mind,” the first single from our new album Warm Nothing that will be released by JAXART soon:
Juiceboxxx has been crashing at my house for the past month, stressing about meeting his new goal to blog every single day. Apparently, some TED Conference speaker convinced him that blogging everyday is the key to making stuff happen. I buy the argument completely. I’m not prepared to publish something every day, but Juice’s blogging has inspired me to blog at least more regularly than I have been blogging. March 2012 seems like a fun place to start, so here I go. Starting next week, I’ll be posting dispatches from the road…
I'm a musician and writer from Los Angeles. I've previously been a member of the bands Pizza! and Big Whup, and I'm currently making solo material and playing with So Many Wizards.
