Kindling for the Master: the Malkmus Cover
October 24, 2008
Ok this is several months old but I have nothing new so I am going back a bit. One of my all time favorite songwriters is Stephen Malkmus. For those unlucky enough not to know, SM was the leader and primary songwriter for the greatest indie band ever. they were called pavement and they were the bomb.
I am something of a regular on the Malkmus message board (the only one i post to really) and there is a nice little community of bookish, very funny, and interesting posters. Many of us are musicians (or like to think of ourselves as that). Many of us went in to cover pavement or malkmus songs. There have been two collections so far. This song comes fromt he second. maybe I will post the first at a later date.
(if you are not familiar with the original, grab it HERE)
So, “Kindling for the Master”…
This song is from the album “Face the Truth”. An album that has divided malkmus fans. It is an album that was recorded in his basement and is mostly “just him” without his excellent backing band, The Jicks. The album was a hodgepodge of all different styles. From sucessfull (and failed) expirements to standard “jicks” tunes. Some hate it, some love it. I think about 60% is ace and the rest is good for the rubbish bin.
This song is, in fact, in my opinion, one in the later category. After the first round, where i covered a song I really wanted to, I had no desire to cover any other song. Someone (I think it was you, swede), suggested choosing the song I liked the least, and cover that one.
Stephen Malkmus’s Version
This falls into the failed experiment category. Its something of a techno weird-out. it’s all fake drums, keyboards, quirky guitar parts, sampled vocals (or at least processed vocals) and it all really doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not even a good failure. Its just bland.
Malkmus vs. Britney
There is a whole side story that i will not go into. (see the Spears 50 Post game link on kebabdylan.com) but… when I started working on this version, i was working on covering “piece of me” by mrs. spears. I quit working on it, to do this song. so i decided to imploy the same methodology to Malkmus as I was using with Britney.
My Version of Kindling
In short, here was my challenge. keep the lyrics and melody, but rewrite – entirely - the music. It was what I was doing with the britney song, so I decided to do it with this one.
The song starts of with an intro. This is a pretty obvious example of what I was trying to do. The intro in the original song is pretty much just static G chord with a simple 4 note melody (b-c-d-g).
I kept the melody but the chords are changed to:
G | D#m | Em | D#m | Bm | C#+5dim | E/C+5dim
There is the guitar part along with several midi tracks orchestrating it. The original is primariy midi, so I wanted to make sure I had a lot as well. and i do.
Next it kicks into the chorus which melodically is just a two note melody, which gave me a lot of freedom to do pretty much what I wanted to do with it. In Malkmus’s version, it is a one chord chorus. In my version it is a very active, somewhat non-traditional, progression (with the two note melody on top). The progression uses several diminished notes and turns out to be:
A | G | B | Bb | E | Eb | D
The main verses also deviate from the original. I honestly do not know what they original is. Once I got the melodies down, I stopped listening to the song. Main verses turned out to be:
Em | Em7 | Ab G | Eb
The one part that returns to the original is the last part where the basic chords are E G A. It is out of order, due to my not listening to the song much. oops.
I did throw in a nod to talking heads with the synth part. Filling in the space I took the basic melody and bent the notes with the little bender thing on my keyboard. Making many of the notes go slightly out of tune. I got a sound that resembled Houses in Motion - the bumble bee sound, as my dad once called it.
The last part is just guitar parts building up to the conclusion, which turns out not that different from the original.
