Project 1: The Playlist Challenge

Myself and a couple of my old music loving friends, Tom Stromsodt and Brian Eveslage, organized a simple cover song project. We each curated playlists and shared them with one another. Each person then had to pick 3 songs to cover, selected from the playlists created by the other guys.

Contributor Status: CLOSED - This is what inspired it all, and I want to give Tom, Brian, and I a chance to finish what we started.

Tom’s Songs

I'm sure Ray Dorset and his bandmates are perfectly fine people.  However, for this version, I created the fictional character of Mungo Jerry who, in 1981, hastily chomps his last bar of xanax in an effort to get through his seminal warm weather hit.

In the words of Tom, “sometimes you shouldn’t cover a song, but you still do.”

I was trying to record a straight country version but this feels like R.E.M. as presented by MasterCard. My daughter sings real pretty though. 

Neil’s Songs

I chose REM’s “Get Up,” because it made me feel like a middle schooler again. That’s when my older brother, who was in college, gave me a “dubbed” cassette copy of REM’s “Green” album. The album really got to me in a different way than most music did at that time. I was a young dude, living in a small town, and listening mostly to metal and hard rock bands. While I had a vague familiarity with REM, this was the first time I spent solid listening time with one of their albums. Things soaked in. I came to know it’s bones intimately. They helped loosen metal’s grip. REM had both an earnest energy and an elusiveness that were foreign and intriguing compared to the blunt force, sonic sledgehammer music I had become accustomed to hearing. I wasn’t always sure what they were singing about, but it seemed poetic, cryptic, and possibly political in a way that was just outside of my simple comprehension. I wanted to understand the inside joke. Before long, seventh grade Neil started playing the likes of REM and the Cars in his headphones a little more than Metallica.

This song always got stuck in my head. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the same chord progression over and over again. Maybe it’s the weird falsetto that singer used. I wanted to do something different with it; slow it down maybe. Not sure I really explore new ground, but it was a fun quick cover.

Brian’s Songs

Coming soon…