Project 25: Back to where it all started… the playlist challenge!

The votes are in, and the people have chosen to return to the challenge that started it all... the playlist. It seems fitting to go back to our roots for the 25th Project.

It's a simple process.
1. Participants create a 5 song playlist using YouTube or Spotify.
2. Playlists will be posted as they roll in up until 9pm CT on Friday, May 26th.
3. Interested parties will check out the playlists and pick a song or songs to cover.
4. Song will be posted on Sunday, June 25th.

The playlists were submitted (see below), songs were selected, and all have been posted. Check the out!

DOWNLOAD A PLAYLIST WITH ALL OF THE SONGS HERE!

Mike Bettison covers
Light Pours Out of Me by Magazine

I just loved this video and the song. I hadn't heard it before this project and now I'm a fan. I also saw that Ministry covered it and was inspired to f#@! with my voice to hide the fact that I can't sing. :-) (Mouth from Tim Exile)

I used Ableton Live 11 and Native Instruments sounds for the most part including Electric Sunburst and Electric Mint session guitarist, Abbey Road 80's drums, and Scarbee Rickenbacker Bass. No actual guitars or drums were played (or harmed) for this production I'm sorry to say. :-) Mastered with Ozone 10. 

Pocket Calculator by Kraftwerk

This was so fun to rebuild. These guys are geniuses! I started by trying to do a straight copy in Ableton Live with 606 drums and some NI synth bloopies but then thought it would be funny to bring in some Butch Vig drum sounds and patterns from Native Instruments, some 5th grade humor and rearrange into a slightly shorter work. I used Ozone 10 EDM setting for the mastering. And the German speaker was from a free text to speech app I found online. 

Kelly Duclos covers
Long Way by Laney Jones

Kangaroo by Big Star

Neil Fasen covers Ambulance by TV on The Radio

I’m a sucker for creative vocal shit, so it’s no surprise that I love TV on the Radio. Clearly they do much more than simply feature innovative vocals, but that was certainly a hook for me. Ambulance is an excellent example of how they’re able to create something very unique and engaging with pretty much only their voices. Though I was tempted to try my own vocals-only rendition of Ambulance, I decided to try something a little different.

Andrew Charon covers Double Negative by Hammerhead

I thought it might be a good idea to try to do a cover inspired by Double Negative by Hammerhead. The path was unclear; it started muted on the acoustic, passed to Margaritas, a vocal partner from Belarus (via Fiverr), to add vocals. I tried to re-record guitar but it was best as is. I polished it with key leads on Logic, and, well, here it is. Not sure of the outcome, but the process was fun. I asked ChatGPT to decode the lyrics-- it said “The provided text appears to be a song or poem with ominous undertones. The lyrics suggest the singer has been cursed and possibly murdered, but continued to persevere even after death. The tone is serious, and implies a darker or supernatural theme.” On that note, enjoy.

Rebecca Fritz covers
Just Like You Said It Would Be by Sinêad O’Connor

When I saw this on the list and thought a big yes! I'm a big fan of Sinead's; her music and voice is incredible. 

Then I thought, wait, no way am I going to get close to her performance, I mean, come on. But I found myself upset at shying away from the chance to try it. Plus I saw it as a good challenge to develop my voice more, and just see what I could do. 

The other fun part about this project was I just bought a Mini Freak synth, and it was an opportune chance to use it. Still haven't read the manual yet, but just messing with it gave me some sounds I liked for this. 

Not sure if I mixed the vocals too high - I was trying to mimic the original production. 

So grateful for this community!

Pete Fleming covers Riot by Hugh Masekala

Hugh Masekela - Riot … what an awesome song! I am just getting back into tinkering with music making again so I LOVE the idea of “sketching” — low pressure, fun-focused jammin'. My newest toy is the Orba2 so I challenged myself to use it for everything on this sketch. It’s a very loose interpretation…more like "inspired by”…man did I have a good time. I am also tinkering with mixed-media painting ATM and this song inspired that type of sketch too.

Bill Fricke

Lucifer Sam – Pink Floyd

After making attempts to honor the wishes of Andrew Charon (or others) to cover “Interstellar Overdrive” (which makes for an awesome spy movie theme, by the way) and “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”, I finally succeeded in tackling Lucifer Sam. It’s a fairly straight-forward affair. The main guitar riff is a little “surfy”.  Had fun making the backwards guitars and noises to fill it out.

Hurdy Gurdy Man – Donovan

This kept morphing over time and ended up being a bigger production than his simpler arrangement.  Had been watching a YouTube thing about ELO’s first album and Roy Wood’s use of tons of cello overdubs.  That then fed into this version, adding strings and cello-heavy underpinnings, and then it blew up from there.

Rubber Surfer Duckie Girl – Beach Boys vs. The Muppets

This is a completely silly song, but I had to share it. Literally, a week or so before people’s lists were posted, I started singing “Rubber Duckie” to the tune of “Surfer Girl” and chuckled bemusedly to myself and went on my merry way.  So, when it came up in Todd Newman’s list, I HAD to try it out.  And surprisingly, it works!

There was no way of me accomplishing recreating Beach Boys harmonies, and so we have “Muppet” harmonies, which mean, they are all over the place and messy.  The lead vocals were all done in one pass, just changing up the voices as it went along.  Not trying to do specific Muppets (although it gets Kermity a couple of times), but just having fun.

Noah Warren covers Surfer Girl by The Beach Boys

Growing up there was a lot of Beach Boys played in my house, so I never found this song that interesting. If I'm bored with a song I usually sing it in the version of a 1920's crooner to get it out of my head. This one wouldn't leave my head, so I caved and listened to some 1920's standards to get a sense of how they were arranged- I searched for the song played at the end of The Shining - "Midnight, the Stars and You" and had apple music create a station from it.  There's a meticulous and slightly melancholy vibe to this music that I thought was funny when paired with Beach Boys. After I finished recording this, I found out that it was based on Brian Wilson's first girlfriend and was inspired by "When you wish upon a star". I grew to appreciate the simplicity of this song as I worked on it and imagined it was from the perspective of a shark in love with a surfer. Oh forbidden love, there's nothing like it. 

Barrett Haroldson covers Baby Blue by Badfinger

Baby Blue is such a great song. I wanted to create a more sprawling version a la William Tyler or Daniel Lanois. The process may have brought it elsewhere, but I still dig the outcome. This was mostly done with the MiniFreak for the synthy pieces, some pedal steel and a ton of reverb.

Tom Stromsodt covers
Spooky by Dusty Springfield

I liked Noah’s themed playlist and wanted to do something off of it. I planned on making more of a mess per usual but I ended up with my version of smooth jazz. Enjoy?

Ian Royale parodies Hey by the Pixies

So many songs to choose from! Luckily, one of them aligns with one of my 
projects, Eleven Pies [XI PIES], which parodizes the national treasure that is 
Pixies. So, yeah, Hey, was my pick. I had always loved the bassline aganist that
guitar, which I further funked up with some wah-wah. I had everything done except 
the vocals, which an illness prevented me from doing. Today (06/24), I felt much better,
and laid them down. Bacon vs Steak, a timeless dilemma.

Grant Eull covers
Pocket Calculator by Kraftwerk
Films by Gary Numan

I’m a big fan of these playlist projects as it is super interesting to read the vast types of music that all of us submit as ideas for other members to cover. I enjoy the process of creating a “potentials” playlist for my own subsection and narrowing down/review process. I had 10+ immediately that I was very interested in doing. So I hop in my car and crank up the playlist and drive around singing along and imagining an approach or complexity that I may have in attempting to cover the song. At times this can be disappointing because I get pretty excited about a song, but then can’t imagine how I would attempt it … this by the way is what I respect so much and love about how others are able to just be creative in how they cover whatever they want. I am working on this idea this year as well. 

Anyway, I eventually I noticed a sub-theme of 3 songs that sort of make senses under the them of “songs that inspired OMIEM” to be a thing. NIN, Kraftwerk and Gary Numan all hugely influenced my desire to start learning how to work with synths and drum machines - so that became my sub theme to my selections for project 25. Closer, by NIN being the beast and in my opinion the most complex of the 3 was what I started with. It in my opinion is an absolute masterpiece of a sonic journey… and turns out way too tough for me to complete in just a month. It was tabled after a few days as I was not satisfied with the tones I was getting. I hope to continue this challenge in time, but decided to move on to the other two. The approach for Kraftwerks Pocket Calculator was to start with MIDI and program most of it in FL Studio as it had been awhile since I touched that DAW and I wanted an excuse to use it again. In addition my plan was to use a few of my Pocket Operators to layer in textures, blips and beeps calculator style as I believe that these devices and form factor are inspired by this song (this could be a stretch). The result is not an “attempted mimic” of the original, but more of a cover “in the spirit of” with creative freedom to play and have fun with it. The result is obnoxious, but I do hope you enjoy it. Lastly, I needed to attempt a mimic to the best of my home studio abilities cover of Films by Gary Numen. I love that one of his songs from the album Pleasure Principle was listed and I had an absolutely wonderful time recording this cover. Again thanks for the opportunity to continue to challenge my abilities and to work with so much freedom. I am very excited to hear what others decided to work on and submit this month as it’s always fun to listen to the creative covers and very very interesting if two or more of us do the same songs. Jacob, if I ever get back to Closer I certainly let you know. Cheers and thanks again Neil for all the support as this group continues to grow.