I don’t know how long ago it occurred to my that Gordon Lightfoot’s cheesy love ballad would make a great fast punk/pop song, but it’s been at least 15 years. I know I thought about it when I was in the band Stalemate, we were rocking up songs like Jack and Diane, Stuck In the Middle With You and Like a Rolling Stone. Even though it’s a four chord cheesy pop song, it’s a long one with a couple of changes that feel a little unnatural if you haven’t heard the song a bejillion times, so I don’t think I ever brought it up. Once it occurred to me I could never hear, “I never thought I could act this way and I have to say that I just don’t get it..” without thinking this really needs to be fast and he really needs to be yelling.
I can’t tell you exactly what finally made me decide to get it done, but once I started it was one of those things that just needed to get finished. I programmed the drums, recorded the guitar and when I went to put the bass down there was something wrong with the electronics in my bass (we’d had a flood and it took on a little water), so I recorded a bass line with the guitar and dropped it an octave with the studio software. Sounded good enough to put some vocals down so I went ahead and in one day I was done. I played it for family and friends and it sounded pretty good. Heck people make videos of covers all the time, I think I’ll make a video.
The video was also a one day affair, at least as far as getting the footage recorded. How could I not start with a guy trying to play it the original way and…something’s just not right. I went through two costumes each for guitar, bass and vocals. I didn’t have anything like a drumset left in the house since the flood, how do I do the drum guy? Got a Bodhran…
So in truth this is the moment that leads to the release of this Anthology. I was already using Reverb Nation to get my songs up on Facebook, and I had seen something about them having a way to get a song on iTunes. Can I sell Gordon Lightfoot’s song? How does that work. Some internet searching turned up a publisher that owns the rights to the song and I hooked it up. That’s right Gordon gets a few cents whenever somebody buys my version. Then I figured out it cost the same to release an “album” as a “song”. I need to get an album together. I started the process of gathering songs and making them sound as professional as I could. I even re-recorded the bass for this cut with an actual bass guitar. Can you tell the difference?
