Kindling for the Master: the Malkmus Cover

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.

Download the song here

(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.

Download the song here

Time Takes Your Chances Away

Brace yourself for “Singer/Songwriter” Kebab! This weeks song is another experiement. Actually recorded prior to the last song, but still needed some work. My self-set rules were 1. use standard tuning 2. use standard chords 3. no distortion. I ended up with a couple guitar tracks and a handful of midi tracks. The current mix has the guitar parts even lower in the mix that I first had them (I am still working with the mix so I may or may not post a version 2 at a later date).

Download Time Takes Your Chances Away

When I sit down with a guitar I am usually pushing myself to find something new and interesting. Whether it’s messing with tunings or throwing in strange chord changes or odd notes, or building the singing melody into it or work off the singing melody. I certainly am not inventing anything new. I would consider my songs pretty much within the traditional song structure bucket, but I hope that I add a little flavor to that bucket.

The Music

So for this song I gave myself the challenge of writing a song using basic chords in standard tuning. The melody will be sung over said chords. I obeyed those rules for the most part. The outro is a little unusual but for the most part we have ourselves a very straightforward, out of right-field song.

It all started with the opening melody and the words “say what you want to say” From there I just played what seemed completely predictable but pleasant chords. One thing very new for me was that I was struggling with the chorus and ended hashing that out sitting at a piano. I am not a piano player by any stretch, but I’ve become competent enough to be able to tinker. I find the piano is very good for working melody into songs or build chords around a given melody. Whereas the guitar is pretty much a good base to add melody on top of.

That’s about it for music. The outro, as I said, is a little more out there but not really (from C#minor to B i added a Cminor so it is a series of half steps). This song in general is part of my getting to know MIDI exercise and the so there is a lot of MIDI in it. I particularity like the ending where i have two keyboard parts playing the same three notes of what ever chord but in different sequences. They kinda fit together to create a single sound but in different speakers.

The Lyrics

I wanted to mess around with the lyrics a bit due to the song being “not messed with”. The idea was to have a “carpe diem” type song but inverse the mood and meaning. I think of those types of songs as “go get ‘em tiger” positive type songs. And while there is some value to that approach to life, it is also not without issues. It can be an extremely selfish way to live.

So I tried to lyrically have the words start out being that type of song, but the song to actually be somewhat depressing and resigned. The first verse is “say what you want to say, until you’ve said it all” and “take what you want to take, until you take it all” I thought the second line should raise an eyebrow. Not necessarily the best advise to just take anything you want. In the second verse, I go further. the last line is “Break what you have to break”

The chorus is based on something else. I wanted to continue with the reversal of traditional meanings. The lines are “She was an angel hanging by a thread, and I was the candle burning bright and burning red”

Angels are generally symbols of helpers and savers, in this instance the angel is in need of help. Candles are symbols of hope and faith, but in this instance it is more ominous, burning strong and about to consume the thread the angel is hanging on.

Download Time Takes Your Chances Away

Good times!. So give it a listen and please comment, even if you hate it.

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Bury It

This songs comes to us from yet another novel. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a tale of an autistic kid who finds the neighbor’s dog murdered (with a pitchfork, no less) and his attempt to track down the culprit, Sherlock Holmes style. Although it sounds gimmicky, the book is from the perspective of the autistic kid and is extremely sad, funny, and enlightening.

Listen & Download Bury It

This song is also my rediscovering standard tuning. After years of almost always screwing around with my strings, this is the first of several (more to come soon) songs written in good ole EADGBE.

Lyrics

Leave well enough alone and drop it
If you knew what the neighbors know, you would drop it

Machine hum in head
Reading letters from the dead
Machine hum in head

Liars lying low
Criers crying home
Liars lying low

When you found it all alone, and you carried it
If you knew what the neighbors know, you would bury it

Liars lying low
Criers crying home
Liars lying low

Origins

So some of you are [ familiar with/actually in ] the detholz!. A primo band from chicago. beside being a good band with good songs, they have a special talent at deconstructing bad 80’s songs and reconstructing them into horribly complex and, well, good songs. I have a deep love for reinterpreting, in a semi ironic manner, popular songs as well (more on that some other day). Anyway… I got the idea of taking detholz songs that tend to be more complex and good, and turning them into simple and bad pop songs. I think i have successfully done that to one of them. Sometime I do plan to commit my singer/songwriter version of “behold the man” to .wav

Anyway I had the idea (and it sounded great in my head at they time) to turn the song “sunburned in the sun” into a green day song. When I sat down and tried to get it working, well…, it didn’t… at all. So I ditched that. But immediately came up with the guitar part for this song. It’s in Eb and even has a G drone through a lot of it ala SITS. Other than that, the song doesn’t sound anything like it or have any other similarities. But that is its auspicious beginnings.

Music

The song starts with a muted plucking of the primary chord. Between each verse and between the various later sections, it keeps returning to it. It ends as well, just as it begins, with a muted guitar playing that chord. The song wanders off a bit in the second half so that was a way to keep it anchored.

There are a lot of half steps in this song. The chorus melody is mostly half steps by using augmented and diminished chords (i think that is the technical term) as well as at one point going from Em to Eb. From verse to chorus, it goes from G# to G, another half step. At the end there is a guitar line that walks up mostly in half steps. Can’t say I planned all the half steps. But as I have listened to it, it’s something I have noticed.

The verses have a distinct progression but the notes (in the first part of each verse) are all part of the Eb scale, so in the second verse, I decided to pound out the single chord on top of the mix (the C chord (pattern?) up on the 6th fret has a real nice sound to it with doubled notes.

The drum sequencing in my songs tend to leave a lot to be desired. I am a really bad drummer and tend to be over ambitious in sequencing drums to fit the specifics of a song. But in this case, I think the drum track actually adds to the song, giving it a good groove with its particular bam-bam … bam pattern

The mid section. I wanted to do two things. One is to have it be just a single chord (back to Eb) and have it be a groove. I was thinking Talking Heads (early stuff) like found a job where they build this great vibe with very little complexity going on.

I also had in mind to build it up (which i always seem to do) with a progressively noisier sound. I actually ended up playing one guitar part with a phone just to get a cool sound out of it. The little melody that starts off the mid section is another nod to the detholz.

At the very end, I start playing full chords (of the verses) with a melody over it. Second pass through, there is another guitar line (i mentioned earlier). I ended up turning some chords minor where it would be natural to be major and also the other way around, which actually allowed me to do that half step walk up I mentioned earlier. It did not affect the melody of the song, so I could still sing the same thing over it.

The last half of the song sort of juts off into its own territory without returning. That was inspired by the book. In it, without getting into details, the kid starts investigating the murder of this dog, but in that, other secrets are discovered and his search goes somewhere completely else and the murdered dog turns out to have nothing to do with the second half of the book. I was attempting to do the same in the song. Although, I ended up putting the vocal parts at the end to tie it up and as it turns out, is my favorite part of the song.

Listen & Download Bury It

4 Responses to “Bury It”