Hey Diddle Diddle, Here’s Your Damn Fiddle
I got a nice fiddle part from Larry for “Just as Long as Me” and have mixed it in with the original tracks. I think it improves the song greatly, and makes my bluegrass faking sound plenty less fake. Larry plays with a band called Gaia Consort, a self-described psychedelic folk-rock band. Give it a listen. Thanks Larry!
Own a VTAW
Len and Nora at Jawbone have started a fund raising campaign to send them to the Portable Media Expo in September. They’re offering an original drawing from Len’s Thing a Week images to the first person who donates $200. This is a piece of history people. You will be the envy of every Jonathan Coulton fan on your block and all it will cost you is two hundred tiny dollars.
Thing a Week 37 – Rock and Roll Boy
I went trolling for some interesting audio this week over at the Internet Archive – frankly, I’m a little sick of writing songs, and I wanted to flush out the system with a found audio thingie. I found this treasure trove, a collection of kids on cassette in the public domain (if you’ve never been to the Internet Archive, you should check it out – it’s non-profit with an enormous library of, like, everything). It brought back fond memories of yelling nonsense into the grill of a 40-pound tape recorder with a record button you had to lean on and mash down with your whole hand. And I was blown away by six-year-old Justin’s “Rock and Roll Boy,” which begins with the most fantastic opening lines in the history of rock and roll.
So I wrote a song around Justin’s vocals. He wasn’t thoughtful enough to provide a third verse or a bridge, and he wandered a bit in terms of key, so I had to improvise. But I really think he had an actual song in his head. Which is more than I can say for myself some weeks…
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