It’s Replay Thursday (renamed from Repost Thursday, because “replay” sounds better). The song I wrote, recorded and released this week last year was “Out in the Cold Cold Wind,” which ended up on my album, “It’s Chicago!” which you can go buy in iTunes or over at CDBaby.
The original version, which is basically exactly the same as the album version and which you can listen to here, was in 3/4 time and I wrote it on one of those absolutely frigid Chicago nights. Was a beautiful night actually. A lovely, post-Christmas, pre-New Year night. A nice, slow, easy-paced night. That’s how I wrote the song, that’s how I sung it too.
This new version is a bit hotter. It’s hotter outside today. It’s gonna be 60 degrees tomorrow to send out 2010. This new one moves. It’s a lot like my other song from a few months back “I ain’t gonna be returnin that-a-way.” Well, actually, it doesn’t sound anything like that version of that song. But I play “Ain’t returnin” different for different occasions and this new version of “Cold Cold Wind” sounds like a different version of “Ain’t returnin.”
Okay. That’s it. Soon it’ll be 2011. See ya there.
Here we go. The last song of 2010. This one, I think, is purely for my own enjoyment. Maybe for someone else. Maybe. I wrote it on the 23rd. Finished it on the 24th. Ain’t no Christmas song. More like a Thanksgiving song, I suppose.
It’s inspired by a certain someone. Thanks, Certain Someone.
Anyway. It’s a pretty typical blues tune. Actually, it’s almost exactly the same melody and guitar part as the song “Leavin’ You” (originally titled “Oh mama, don’t you make me”) that I wrote back in July. You can hear that song here.
So that’s that for 2010.
Well, not really. I’ll write and post a new version of Talkin’ Headline tomorrow and re-record a new version of the song I wrote one year ago this week (Out in the Cold Cold Wind) on Thursday. And, of course, the new song I write that I post of January 3rd could possibly still be written in 2010. But, apart from those, 2010 is up.
Let’s take a look back, huh?
All in all I wrote and posted 48 new songs. This includes all the songs I posted brand new on a Monday (or later in the week if I missed my deadline) and any additional songs I wrote and posted (if more than 2 in a week). Also in there are the 6 versions of Talkin’ Headline that I posted. (I actually wrote 7, but only recorded and posted 6, so I won’t count that one, which is now irrelevant because its full of old news.) It doesn’t include any re-recorded material that was written in a previous year or any songs I wrote but didn’t record for one reason or another.
Not bad. 48 newly published songs. That’s almost one for every week of the year. I went from January 4, 2010 until February 15 really strong. Didn’t miss a day. Didn’t miss a beat. A lot of the songs I wrote in this period made it onto one or the other of my two albums.
Then I hit a rough patch. I remember it well. I wasn’t writing. I was just waiting around for songs to come. That ain’t a good idea. Ever.
I finally picked it back up the week of April 28. Seems I recorded 2 songs that day. And then didn’t miss a week of posting a new song for the rest of the year (expect for the week of July 26 when I was busy getting my two albums to the production line and getting everything finalized for the release of both).
Anyway. I kinda fell into a groove. It got really easy to just churn out a song. So I started doing a couple different things. I tried writing a song every day of the week (that was hard), I wrote one new verse each day for a song and recorded each verse on a different instrument (that was fun), and I did a whole week of new talkin’ blues songs each day based on headlines on cnn.com (that was mind-numbing).
For 2011 I’ll take a few of those ideas and keep at them. I’m sure I’ll come up with a few others, though. I’m also planning to record and release another album with songs from the past year. (there are probably 5 to 7 that I think will definitely make it, can you guess which ones?) That’ll hopefully happen by March sometime, but I haven’t thought about it too much.
Mostly I’ll be trying to get out and play some of these 2010 songs. So I’ll see ya around.
Ok, folks. Here’s the second installment of “Repost Thursday.” You can check out the first one I did (a couple weeks ago) here. In that, I re-recorded the version of “Unworried Mind” that I first recorded the week of December 7 back in 2009. I hadn’t come up with the snappy name of Repost Thursday. I just did that yesterday. I think it’s got a nice ring to it. Or, at least some kind of ring to it, anyway.
Well, for this round I re-recorded my song “Mister Mayor Says” that I first released one year ago this week. (Listen to the original version here.) I wasn’t actually going to re-record it because this was a track on my record “It’s Chicago!” that I just put out in August. (You have a copy, right? No? Well, you’re in luck. You can go here to download the mp3s for a minimal fee. [You can also buy it on iTunes or Amazon, if you wish.] By purchasing the electronic files only you save trees and save on plastic production. If you need a real live hard-copy, though, I have those too.
That was a long aside, huh?
So, anyway, I was gonna not re-record this one and just use the album version, but then I figured that’d be an easy way out. Plus, the album version and the version I recorded in December 2009 are pretty much the same.
So I went ahead and mixed it all up.
This version is in 3/4 time. Has some mouth harp. The singing is quite different. The words are all pretty much the same, though.
And, that’s that. I kinda like this version. I may even try playing this one out. I’d stopped performing it cause the Mayor’s quittin soon and I don’t like shooting fish after their already caught. Plus its got some references to things that happened a couple years ago (like Chicago not getting the Olympics).
Anyway…be sure to check back tomorrow for the old version.
Here’s the first installment of “Talkin’ Headline Tuesday.” The first of many. I’ll be doing one of these every week from here on out. So whatever’s in the news on Monday I’ll write into a song, record it Monday night, and post it here on Tuesday.
Simple enough, huh?
I won’t do a whole lot of writing about the songs, unless there’s something particularly interesting going on in the news (which there almost never is). If you want some background on where this song initially came from, or background on the talkin’ blues, you can check out thesepoststhatI madea whileback. There’s a few pages of songs and writing. Go ahead, have a read and take a listen.
That’s it. Come back on Thursday, though, cause I’ll be posting a re-recorded version of the song I wrote new and posted one year ago this week. It’s gonna be exciting. Very, very exciting. I’m excited.
Music Vomit 