A long time ago in a DAW not at all far away from where I’m sitting (approx. 1 ft.), I put together a collection of cover songs. I’d recorded them over the years for various reasons, never officially releasing any of them.
Well, having remixed them to better standards late last year, they’re now ready to go in a new collection called Hit Sugar. It’s available now on Bandcamp and will shortly be available at yr usual suspects. What’s on this thing? Let’s find out…
1 “Now and Then” (Beatles cover): I decided I’d try cover this song as if John had written it in 1967 or so, during Peppertime.
My fake orchestrations combos that I don’t think are on any Beatles records (a French horn and a flute, a bassoon and an English horn…). Of course, the Beatles of this era rarely left the sound of even acoustic instruments alone…so nearly everything has its own particular treatment. Afterwards I realized that nearly everything in the song (except John’s lead vocal) tends to work in pairs alongside other instruments—hidden and unconscious logic! (I recorded this in 2023 using isolated John and Paul vocals…but I re-sang those parts myself here because, yeah, sure, getting clearance to use Beatle vocals is easy.)
I also rearranged the song structure: while I understand why Paul didn’t use any of the extended, wandering bridge found in John’s demo (you can easily find it online)—it built a bit of tension, and made the instrumental section more powerful emotionally—I decided I really liked the first two phrases of it. I put it in a different location than on the demo, though. This allowed me to do something my ears kept expecting the actual recording to do: at some point alter that A minor chord ending the verse to an A major (the bridge is in F-sharp minor, so that A major provides a smoother segue, being the relative major of that minor key). This move sort of reverses what Paul does at the end of the instrumental section, changing the D major to a D minor (before moving to G to lead in to the verse in A minor: I put the second chorus here instead, and truncated the phrase on the D minor to lead to the G of the chorus…).
George was an instrumental innovator in several ways. He’s maybe best-known for his distinctive slide guitar work…but he hadn’t developed that until after the Beatles. He also incorporated Indian music into Beatles songs, and he was the first to be intrigued by synths and other electronic instruments. The instrumental section here is my tribute to George: the main line is played by (fake) sitar and a (sampled) Ondes Martenot, an early synthesizer (similar to and contemporary with the clavioline, as heard on “Baby You’re a Rich Man”) that I’m imagining George might have enjoyed playing with. (NOTE: This mix is exclusive to Bandcamp, for now at least. What you’ll hear on YouTube etc. is a slightly different mix.)
2 “Days” (Television/Kinks cover): Several years ago, I was making a mix when I couldn’t remember whether a particular cover was a version of “Days” by the Kinks or “Days” by Television. This got me thinking…there are actually a number of similarities between the two songs: they’re close in tempo, they’re in related keys, and lines from one song could be imported into the other without doing drastic violence to the overall lyric…since both are retrospective, bittersweet, and so on.
So I worked up a mashup cover that incorporated elements of both songs in one. The Television version predominates…but I gradually incorporated a number of references to the Kinks song. To start with, the last 2 beats of every other bar during the verse have the melody of “I’m thinking of the days…” in the bass. I also quote a variation of the melody of “I’ll remember all my life” in the guitar tag at the end of each verse. Most obviously, the chorus uses the words and a similar melody from the bridge of the Kinks song. I also added some backing vocals that come from verses in the Kinks song…and an entire bridge borrowed from the Kinks.
Amusingly, because a section of that bridge oscillates between A and Dm, I was reminded of Tom Verlaine’s song “Without a Word.” While in the Kinks song those chords are V and i, in Verlaine they’re I and iv…but I quoted the guitar melody of “Without a Word” between lines of the bridge—only to realize that that melody is the same, except for some rhythmic differences, as “I’m thinking of the days…” from the Kinks song!
3 “One Hundred Years” [mono] (The Cure cover): So, several years back, a friend idly wondered what “One Hundred Years” would have sounded like if it were a 1964 Beatles song.
Hold my beer.
You can read about it in way more depth here—but essentially, I translated the Cure’s chords into something more appropriate to ’64 Beatles, limited the drums to what Ringo’s kit was like in that era, and faked an electric 12-string by dubbing (mostly) octaves.
I turned one of Smith’s (many, many) verses into a bridge, because while he’s droning away on the same two chords forever, 1964 was a little early for Beatles drone-mania…so I used the incessant cowbell to create a similar time-stood-still effect.
4 “God Bless the Child” (Billie Holiday cover): The oldest song here (both in terms of the basics of my recording (2010) and when the song originally came out: 1942!). This was originally slated to be a collaboration with Rex Broome for his awesome 2010 project 39-40 in which he recorded a new cover song every day leading up to his 40th birthday. The collaboration ended being slightly derailed, because my original notion of the song shifted course while Rex stuck with it. (I think it’s still out there, if you dig…) I was trying to figure out how to approach a moldy jazz number (I do not play jazz: I have too much respect for the genre to even try), and it occurred to me that one read on the lyrics was a bitter anger at class presumptions…and so, voila! Garage rock! Bash it out! (The modulation to the chords of the organ solo turns out to be exactly the same as in Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away”: wut?)
5 “Doubtful Sound” (Skates & Rays/The Armoires cover): Speaking of Rex, this is one of his songs, originally recorded (I think) by his band Skates & Rays but more recently appearing on a record by his and biz partner Christina Bulbenko’s fabulous Armoires. I’ve always thought this is an excellent song. Because Rex and I are mutual fans of John Cale, I did this one (as part of the aforementioned 39-40 project) in sort of John Cale style: piano and viola. (Both are fake: do I have to keep saying that?)
6 “Rosy Overdrive” (The Loud Family cover): I can’t quite recall if anything specific inspired me to cover this wonderful Loud Family song…but it may have been an attempt to reincorporate bits of its earlier incarnation of “Rose of Sharon Time.” This was originally slated to be released on a Scott Miller tribute album…but that release fell by the wayside (twice, in fact) and is unlikely to be resurrected, sadly.
7 “Valerie Loves Me” (Material Issue cover): Another old favorite…I wanted to do a largely acoustic version of this, and interpret the lyrics a little differently (I changed one or two words here and there to point the direction). Jim Ellison claimed this song was about a young girl he had a crush on as a kid…but this song really does not read like it has anything to do with childhood crushes. I read it as about lost opportunities not taken….
8 “Days” (acoustic version): wot it sez on the tin. I stripped back the amp modeling a bit and left out the drums and organ.
(Bonus tracks: I had a few stray bits of sound floating around, and this album was running short…so I Uncle-Ernie’d them a bit and added them.)
9 “Still Streets (Victorian)”: I did a remix of “Victorian Photographs” by stripping away many elements, then taking all the vocals in each verse and layering them into a big ol’ echoey layer. I added an opening fragment, which is an altered bit of unused strings from “Contrafact.” (Originally, I tried to layer the whole strings bit over the second verse, because the chords are similar…but it just didn’t work, so I abandoned that idea in favor of just creating a new intro here.)
10 “Hi Duo in Irrah”: This one originated as an extension to a cover of a song that will probably never be officially released…since it’s a cover of a (not officially released) Wire song built on samples from ‘80s Wire songs. Neither the song nor the samples are used here. Originally, that cover developed into an extended, electronic, abstract instrumental coda…but I decided that the coda dissipated the impact of the song proper, and made it into its own thing. Changes in the 2025 remix include dialing back the noisy interjections…which are, again, distorted vocals from the cover song. Curiously, that does not mean there are any Wire lyrics here…because I couldn’t understand ¾ of the Wire lyrics in the dubious bootleg I sleuthed, so I…made them up.
11 “One Hundred Years” [fake stereo version] (The Cure cover): The main version is, as suited to “1964 Beatles,” in mono. This is the “fake stereo” version…with every element shunted to one stereo channel or the other. Just imagine the black Capitol Records label with the rainbow surround spinning on your turntable.
The Architectural Dance Society 