Jam Report #56: 1/5/03
Jan. 5th, 2003 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 2/6/06.
In which Mimi and her djembe rejoin us to the happiness of all; in which much amusement is had over the resident cat and parrot; and in which we must branch out into previously uncharted areas thanks to exhausting Anna's guitar repetoire. Songs: "Mari-Mac", "Goin' Up", "Trois Navires de Ble", "Lukey", "Suspicious Minds", "Take On Me", "The Chemical Worker's Song", "General Taylor".
Coming out of the year-end holiday distractions that inevitably eat up one's time, our first session of the year 2003 wound up having more people present than one might have expected. I would say that Session #56 was a low-turnout session, but then again, given that "full strength" for us these days translates to "seven", this means we actually had a majority of us present:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird (Dara), Fred, ssha (Cyn), mamishka (Mimi), and me. Being down daspatrick (Patrick) and Monica does make a big impact on the strength of our sound, though, since their absence meant I was the only guitarist present. And although I'm getting comfier with playing Rags, I'm still not as comfy at whipping off a song on the guitar as Monica and Patrick are. Besides, we just missed them! It just goes to show that there are ways that everybody in the group contributes, and their absences are keenly felt when they occur.
However, this session also marked the return of Mimi, who had been greatly missed the past two months, and it marked the return of Mimi's djembe! (General point of reference: if you're in Seattle and you need to take a djembe somewhere to get a new head for it, the Fremont Drum Shop is the place to go. Not only did they put a new head on it, they put one on it that actually made the drum sound better than before. Hurray!)
Furthermore, this session had a very high quotient of amusement value derived from the pets of the Murkworks household, starting off with much giggling over our cat Polly parking by Fred's dulcimer and poking at the string bits dangling off the end with her paw... and looking pretty much exactly as if she expected to sit down and play the instrument herself. We took pictures. And we also teased Dara for her own relentless teasing of said cat, though Dara staunchly informed us that "You're supposed to torture cats, that's what they're for!" This, however, is the same Dara that insists that all cats love the Centrifuge Kitty Game. Polly stoically humors her, and I keep telling her that she's racking up karma to die in the rain of jaguars that the Mayans claimed would be one of the ways the world would end.
Unfortunately, though, Cyn's fiddle seemed to pick up some feline temperament that day, as it flat refused to let her tune it properly and wound up making several noises like unto those Polly is wont to make at Dara's more enthusiastic teasing. Cyn finally gave up on playing the fiddle entirely for this session, and focused on singing instead.
As I was the only guitarist/mandolin player present, this did rather limit us for options on what we could play; my repetoire is still somewhat limited, at least in terms of things I can play with comparative ease. By my count, I can comfortably play about 10 songs, some on the mandolin and some on the guitar, without looking at tabs.
This meant, at least for this session, that we therefore started off with "Mari-Mac".
It must be noted, however, that I am still not as solid as I would like to be on this song despite the fact that the thing has exactly four chords in it, and it's pretty much the same pattern of chords all throughout the song. Plus, it's weird to me to be the only guitar; listening to myself on the recording, I noted that I had a fundamentally different sound with my instrument than any of the other acoustic guitars. This is probably due to both the size of my instrument, as Rags is an undersized guitar, and the fact that I have nylon strings instead of steel. Thanks to thousands of listens to Great Big Sea as well as our jam sessions, I'm just used to hearing the sound of a steel-stringed acoustic being the underlying muscle for our songs. Especially on "Mari-Mac". And it doesn't help that, as Dara observed, I also have the hardest guitar to play out of any in the group.
For the first take, I wound up starting off wrong. We also had the inevitable tempo issues, which were especially unsurprising since a) Mimi hadn't been with us for quite some time, and b) the rest of us hadn't exactly been practicing regularly in her absence.
But, we did remember to brief Mimi on the tempo epiphany Dara had had at the last recorded session, i.e., changing tempos on the umba-deedles rather than right after them. And although it was a brand new concept for Mimi (and an only slightly less brand new concept for the rest of us), we did still seem to have it come together enough times to suggest that this method of playing "Mari-Mac" requires further investigation.
We didn't do it more that session, though, since Mimi wound up coughing a lot after that take and her voice needed a break. So we went back to more discussion about what songs I can play, and me being asked what I wanted to play and waffling about it. Cyn teased me about the futility of asking me to make a decision; Fred joked that it was like trying to go to him for music theory, and I reminded everyone that, as Master Tolkien did point out in Lord of the Rings, "Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes."
We finally settled on "Goin' Up" to do next, and I handed out lyrics to those that needed them, while Zoe the parrot happily squawked at us from her position perched on the nearby table. (She was very excited by all of the musical noise happening around her.) I went back to Autumn, which remains my instrument of choice for this ditty, and we took a couple of stabs at it.
Cyn had vocal issues, though. We'd already previously established that this key didn't exactly play well with her particular range, but this time around she kept sounding like she was in the wrong key... though she was consistently flat at the same general level. Later in the session she theorized that she was having an allergic reaction to the Christmas tree in the living room, and has since surmised that she was hearing herself correct in her own head but wasn't quite getting into the right neighborhood of tone thanks to the congestion in her head. It wasn't all that bad when she was singing alone; it actually kind of worked. But when I tried to come in on the "oh oh oh" bits of the choruses, it was more noticeable. Plus, I was playing too slow, and Fred was playing in the wrong key -- he was playing in the key of C and the song's in G.
I raised the issue of a bridge again, since we were completely glossing over the fact that there IS a bridge in the song; of course, this still really can't be fixed until I transcribe the darned bridge, or until somebody with a bridge-playin' type instrument figures out something amusing to do in that section of the song. But I figure I should transcribe the bridge at least as a starting point for Dara or Fred or whomever to figure out whether they want to play that bridge or make up something different.
Zoe continued, at any rate, to be entirely fascinated with what we were doing. Especially when Fred hit a long, high, sustained note on his concertina at her. "Zoe," I observed, "thinks anything is good!"
Zoe was mistaken on the second take of "Goin' Up", though. Our rhythm kept getting out of sync -- which was impressive considering that this time I didn't have the excuse of playing a different strum pattern than Monica, since Monica wasn't there -- and Cyn's voice was wearing out. Mimi tried to sing as well, but the key didn't really work all that well with her voice either, so we moved on to "Trois Navires de Ble".
I went back to the guitar for this ditty, since it has become a more guitar-flavored ditty for me at least when I'm playing as the sole stringed instrument. It's also arguably the thing that I play the best, since I've been playing it long enough that I can whip off the chord line without thinking about it and throw in some occasional rhythmic embellishments. Listening to myself on the recording, I found myself actually non-embarrassed by what I heard.
Plus, Mimi sings this song really well, both in terms of range and in terms of her ability to pronounce French. She and Cyn both came in nicely high and clear over the guitar as well; we got a good balance of sound going.
After that, we went off into a brief divergence of jamming on "Suspicious Minds", as I have begun (at least to some extent) picking up on Patrick's habit of starting to randomly strum stuff in between actually seriously playing with songs. Mimi came in with a very nice drum line to follow me, but what really made it was Cyn joining us -- while serenading the parrot, who was still perched alertly on the table. Her serenade went something like this, to the tune of random bits of "Suspicious Minds":
"She's a bird, Zoe the bird! She's a sup-er bird! Zoe the bird! Super bird! We love Zoe bird, super bird!"
THAT was fun. Very "They Might Be Giants", Mimi dubbed it, to the immediate agreement and amusement of all.
Onward we went to "Lukey" since that was the only other thing I could think of that I could play with ease. Since we'd played it for Monica's wedding in the key of A we decided to stick with that key, though it meant that although we have "Staten Island" written out, it's in the wrong key for playing in the key of A. So we had to advise Fred not to play that yet; it'll require fixing this for later.
Polly was quite jealous that the bird was out, and came nosing around as we played. This naturally led to Cyn promising to sing to the cat and our discussion of Polly being jealous of Zoe. And me trying to burst into a song for the cat, though I quickly lost it dissolving into giggles: "Polly's jealous of Zoe birdie, why can't she understand?" That was about as far as I got, before Dara jumped in with "She just wants to bite her head off" and just as immediately bailed since we couldn't make it work farther than that. ;)
But anyway, back to "Lukey". The good thing about "Lukey" is that I can actually sing the darned thing while I'm playing, so I'm getting rather fond of playing it. The problem though is that I still have to play the thing capoed up two frets, since the chords I know are in the key of G, and I'm not quite fond of the sound of my mandolin capoed. The strings tend to get more rattly, and I also am less fond of my mandolin by itself without guitars to back it up on fast songs.
After that, we did a bit of random playing with "Bumblebee Tuna" again, though not for long. This mostly consisted with the others experimenting with appropriately silly harmonies, while I tried to figure out chords for a measure or two. It didn't take us long to return to one of the recurring themes of the session, which was, "What Can Anna Play?"
I remarked to everyone that most of what else I was comfortable playing was Elvis ditties. Mimi immediately proclaimed that she wanted to play "A Little Less Conversation", but unfortunately I do not yet know how to play that one. I do know how to play, and did mention, "Home is Where the Heart Is" -- but I was a bit uncertain about this one, since it's a slow and sweet ditty and we never really have made a point of trying slow ditties since our spectacular failure with "Greensleeves" way back in early 2001.
Some interest was expressed in "Suspicious Minds", though, enough that I actually broke out a CD with that song on it and played it for everyone. The problem with this song, though, is that the ending just goes on and on until it fades out. Not only is this not exactly useful for jamming purposes, it also actively annoys Cyn, so some work may well need to be done on figuring out how to end it if we tackle this one more in Jam.
So we opted not to fiddle with that one for the time being. We went through my Elvis songbooks, and I found out that although one of my books has "Can't Help Falling in Love" in it -- another Elvis ditty I can play with comparative ease -- it's written out in the key of F. I know it in D, which is the key of the actual recording. So we punted that one too.
And turned, amusingly and a bit surprisingly, to my a-ha songbook. Which I'd actually forgotten that I owned for the longest time... at least until I reassembled my songbook collection and got it all out and in easy reach for musical pursuits. The songbook in question is for a-ha's very first album, Hunting High and Low, released back in the 80's -- i.e., the album that had "Take On Me" on it, the song by a-ha that most people (at least, most people in the U.S.) remember.
We didn't actually get to play this song, but we did give it some heavy listening. And we took turns boggling over the incredible range of notes sung by a-ha's lead singer, Morten Harket, in this one song alone. "Take On Me" covers two and a half octaves. I asserted to the others that, like unto the situation with the lovely and talented Sean McCann, "Mortals are not meant to sing in the key of Morten."
One thing about the songbook's arrangement of that ditty did confuse us, though, since the range as written covered A below middle C clear up to the E two and a half octaves up. At first we wondered how the hell Mr. Harket was hitting that high note -- and then Dara, courtesy of her recent lessons with Kathryn, realized that sometimes people will actually write out music intended for tenor ranges an octave up and use the treble clef for it. So the arrangement we have for the song is written an octave above how Morten Harket was actually singing it.
Even so, we realized that at least back then the man was genuinely in an alto range for his voice. Now he's a tenor. Then, he was an alto.
Some joking discussion took place as to how we might actually play the song. I could almost hear a fiddle treatment of the beepy, techno-y synthesizer bits at the beginning and in between various sections of the song... though it took a bit of effort to actually try to explain to the others that what I was hearing in my head was not a fiddle trying to do the same short beepy sort of style of notes, but rather, a fiddle just whipping through it fast and light, like a fiddle can do. Cyn reported that she could kind of get an idea of how it might sound as well, though Fred also joked about learning it on the concertina -- which would be funny. And I figured, well hey, if the Paperboys could do a Celtic version of "Sexual Healing", we could do "Take On Me".
However, we weren't quite prepared to take on "Take On Me", that session. Mostly because I didn't know the chords yet. So we opted to put the song away till I had an opportunity to learn the chord progression.
So, having exhausted the possibilities for what Anna could play, we jumped over to purely vocal ditties -- and "The Chemical Worker's Song". We hadn't done this one in a very long while, and it was nice to get back to it.
The first take wasn't really a real take, since it just sort of 'happened', with lead singing sort of jointly shared between me and Mimi. I sang melody on the verses and kept jumping into harmony on the choruses. But I had to take a bit of effort to remember what order the verses occurred in, and initially left out the verse pertaining to "overtime and bonus opportunities galore".
Fred tried to fill in his version, though: "Well I'm in the navy and it's overtime I never fucking get".
Mimi plays more of a march rhythm than fans of GBS might be used to for this song, which makes for an interestingly different interpretation. We wound up singing it in a different key than the recorded version as well, at least at first, and the key we started with wound up not working well for Cyn's voice since she was trying to reconstruct the harmony she'd sung before and it didn't work in that key. So I had to go back to consulting GBS's recorded version for a point of reference for a key, and confirmed that we'd been singing lower than GBS's recorded version.
We tried that key, and it didn't work for Cyn either; taking it up a couple of steps till we reached A for a starting note, however, did work. This should be useful information for future attempts to play that song.
Lastly, we took another stab at "General Taylor" by the request of Dara, who just wanted to practice it... though she ruefully remarked afterward that next time she wanted to get in "General Taylor" somewhere besides the tail end of a session. Doing it that late in the session probably contributed to issues she had with tonality on that take, aside from her still being quite nervous about being lead singer on something. But we shall hopefully work it through!
The pie: although writing a Jam Report nearly a month late does tend to blur one's memory as to what sort of pie one ate that far back (and it doesn't help if there's no mention of the kind of pie on the session recording), if I recall correctly we had apple berry. Of course, one can also argue that since we've more than exhausted the repetoire of pies at the local grocery, they've begun to blur together anyway in our group consciousness. Mimi even put in a request for something besides pie for the next session.
More on that later,
Anna the Piper
In which Mimi and her djembe rejoin us to the happiness of all; in which much amusement is had over the resident cat and parrot; and in which we must branch out into previously uncharted areas thanks to exhausting Anna's guitar repetoire. Songs: "Mari-Mac", "Goin' Up", "Trois Navires de Ble", "Lukey", "Suspicious Minds", "Take On Me", "The Chemical Worker's Song", "General Taylor".
Coming out of the year-end holiday distractions that inevitably eat up one's time, our first session of the year 2003 wound up having more people present than one might have expected. I would say that Session #56 was a low-turnout session, but then again, given that "full strength" for us these days translates to "seven", this means we actually had a majority of us present:
solarbird (Dara), Fred, ssha (Cyn), mamishka (Mimi), and me. Being down daspatrick (Patrick) and Monica does make a big impact on the strength of our sound, though, since their absence meant I was the only guitarist present. And although I'm getting comfier with playing Rags, I'm still not as comfy at whipping off a song on the guitar as Monica and Patrick are. Besides, we just missed them! It just goes to show that there are ways that everybody in the group contributes, and their absences are keenly felt when they occur.However, this session also marked the return of Mimi, who had been greatly missed the past two months, and it marked the return of Mimi's djembe! (General point of reference: if you're in Seattle and you need to take a djembe somewhere to get a new head for it, the Fremont Drum Shop is the place to go. Not only did they put a new head on it, they put one on it that actually made the drum sound better than before. Hurray!)
Furthermore, this session had a very high quotient of amusement value derived from the pets of the Murkworks household, starting off with much giggling over our cat Polly parking by Fred's dulcimer and poking at the string bits dangling off the end with her paw... and looking pretty much exactly as if she expected to sit down and play the instrument herself. We took pictures. And we also teased Dara for her own relentless teasing of said cat, though Dara staunchly informed us that "You're supposed to torture cats, that's what they're for!" This, however, is the same Dara that insists that all cats love the Centrifuge Kitty Game. Polly stoically humors her, and I keep telling her that she's racking up karma to die in the rain of jaguars that the Mayans claimed would be one of the ways the world would end.
Unfortunately, though, Cyn's fiddle seemed to pick up some feline temperament that day, as it flat refused to let her tune it properly and wound up making several noises like unto those Polly is wont to make at Dara's more enthusiastic teasing. Cyn finally gave up on playing the fiddle entirely for this session, and focused on singing instead.
As I was the only guitarist/mandolin player present, this did rather limit us for options on what we could play; my repetoire is still somewhat limited, at least in terms of things I can play with comparative ease. By my count, I can comfortably play about 10 songs, some on the mandolin and some on the guitar, without looking at tabs.
This meant, at least for this session, that we therefore started off with "Mari-Mac".
It must be noted, however, that I am still not as solid as I would like to be on this song despite the fact that the thing has exactly four chords in it, and it's pretty much the same pattern of chords all throughout the song. Plus, it's weird to me to be the only guitar; listening to myself on the recording, I noted that I had a fundamentally different sound with my instrument than any of the other acoustic guitars. This is probably due to both the size of my instrument, as Rags is an undersized guitar, and the fact that I have nylon strings instead of steel. Thanks to thousands of listens to Great Big Sea as well as our jam sessions, I'm just used to hearing the sound of a steel-stringed acoustic being the underlying muscle for our songs. Especially on "Mari-Mac". And it doesn't help that, as Dara observed, I also have the hardest guitar to play out of any in the group.
For the first take, I wound up starting off wrong. We also had the inevitable tempo issues, which were especially unsurprising since a) Mimi hadn't been with us for quite some time, and b) the rest of us hadn't exactly been practicing regularly in her absence.
But, we did remember to brief Mimi on the tempo epiphany Dara had had at the last recorded session, i.e., changing tempos on the umba-deedles rather than right after them. And although it was a brand new concept for Mimi (and an only slightly less brand new concept for the rest of us), we did still seem to have it come together enough times to suggest that this method of playing "Mari-Mac" requires further investigation.
We didn't do it more that session, though, since Mimi wound up coughing a lot after that take and her voice needed a break. So we went back to more discussion about what songs I can play, and me being asked what I wanted to play and waffling about it. Cyn teased me about the futility of asking me to make a decision; Fred joked that it was like trying to go to him for music theory, and I reminded everyone that, as Master Tolkien did point out in Lord of the Rings, "Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes."
We finally settled on "Goin' Up" to do next, and I handed out lyrics to those that needed them, while Zoe the parrot happily squawked at us from her position perched on the nearby table. (She was very excited by all of the musical noise happening around her.) I went back to Autumn, which remains my instrument of choice for this ditty, and we took a couple of stabs at it.
Cyn had vocal issues, though. We'd already previously established that this key didn't exactly play well with her particular range, but this time around she kept sounding like she was in the wrong key... though she was consistently flat at the same general level. Later in the session she theorized that she was having an allergic reaction to the Christmas tree in the living room, and has since surmised that she was hearing herself correct in her own head but wasn't quite getting into the right neighborhood of tone thanks to the congestion in her head. It wasn't all that bad when she was singing alone; it actually kind of worked. But when I tried to come in on the "oh oh oh" bits of the choruses, it was more noticeable. Plus, I was playing too slow, and Fred was playing in the wrong key -- he was playing in the key of C and the song's in G.
I raised the issue of a bridge again, since we were completely glossing over the fact that there IS a bridge in the song; of course, this still really can't be fixed until I transcribe the darned bridge, or until somebody with a bridge-playin' type instrument figures out something amusing to do in that section of the song. But I figure I should transcribe the bridge at least as a starting point for Dara or Fred or whomever to figure out whether they want to play that bridge or make up something different.
Zoe continued, at any rate, to be entirely fascinated with what we were doing. Especially when Fred hit a long, high, sustained note on his concertina at her. "Zoe," I observed, "thinks anything is good!"
Zoe was mistaken on the second take of "Goin' Up", though. Our rhythm kept getting out of sync -- which was impressive considering that this time I didn't have the excuse of playing a different strum pattern than Monica, since Monica wasn't there -- and Cyn's voice was wearing out. Mimi tried to sing as well, but the key didn't really work all that well with her voice either, so we moved on to "Trois Navires de Ble".
I went back to the guitar for this ditty, since it has become a more guitar-flavored ditty for me at least when I'm playing as the sole stringed instrument. It's also arguably the thing that I play the best, since I've been playing it long enough that I can whip off the chord line without thinking about it and throw in some occasional rhythmic embellishments. Listening to myself on the recording, I found myself actually non-embarrassed by what I heard.
Plus, Mimi sings this song really well, both in terms of range and in terms of her ability to pronounce French. She and Cyn both came in nicely high and clear over the guitar as well; we got a good balance of sound going.
After that, we went off into a brief divergence of jamming on "Suspicious Minds", as I have begun (at least to some extent) picking up on Patrick's habit of starting to randomly strum stuff in between actually seriously playing with songs. Mimi came in with a very nice drum line to follow me, but what really made it was Cyn joining us -- while serenading the parrot, who was still perched alertly on the table. Her serenade went something like this, to the tune of random bits of "Suspicious Minds":
"She's a bird, Zoe the bird! She's a sup-er bird! Zoe the bird! Super bird! We love Zoe bird, super bird!"
THAT was fun. Very "They Might Be Giants", Mimi dubbed it, to the immediate agreement and amusement of all.
Onward we went to "Lukey" since that was the only other thing I could think of that I could play with ease. Since we'd played it for Monica's wedding in the key of A we decided to stick with that key, though it meant that although we have "Staten Island" written out, it's in the wrong key for playing in the key of A. So we had to advise Fred not to play that yet; it'll require fixing this for later.
Polly was quite jealous that the bird was out, and came nosing around as we played. This naturally led to Cyn promising to sing to the cat and our discussion of Polly being jealous of Zoe. And me trying to burst into a song for the cat, though I quickly lost it dissolving into giggles: "Polly's jealous of Zoe birdie, why can't she understand?" That was about as far as I got, before Dara jumped in with "She just wants to bite her head off" and just as immediately bailed since we couldn't make it work farther than that. ;)
But anyway, back to "Lukey". The good thing about "Lukey" is that I can actually sing the darned thing while I'm playing, so I'm getting rather fond of playing it. The problem though is that I still have to play the thing capoed up two frets, since the chords I know are in the key of G, and I'm not quite fond of the sound of my mandolin capoed. The strings tend to get more rattly, and I also am less fond of my mandolin by itself without guitars to back it up on fast songs.
After that, we did a bit of random playing with "Bumblebee Tuna" again, though not for long. This mostly consisted with the others experimenting with appropriately silly harmonies, while I tried to figure out chords for a measure or two. It didn't take us long to return to one of the recurring themes of the session, which was, "What Can Anna Play?"
I remarked to everyone that most of what else I was comfortable playing was Elvis ditties. Mimi immediately proclaimed that she wanted to play "A Little Less Conversation", but unfortunately I do not yet know how to play that one. I do know how to play, and did mention, "Home is Where the Heart Is" -- but I was a bit uncertain about this one, since it's a slow and sweet ditty and we never really have made a point of trying slow ditties since our spectacular failure with "Greensleeves" way back in early 2001.
Some interest was expressed in "Suspicious Minds", though, enough that I actually broke out a CD with that song on it and played it for everyone. The problem with this song, though, is that the ending just goes on and on until it fades out. Not only is this not exactly useful for jamming purposes, it also actively annoys Cyn, so some work may well need to be done on figuring out how to end it if we tackle this one more in Jam.
So we opted not to fiddle with that one for the time being. We went through my Elvis songbooks, and I found out that although one of my books has "Can't Help Falling in Love" in it -- another Elvis ditty I can play with comparative ease -- it's written out in the key of F. I know it in D, which is the key of the actual recording. So we punted that one too.
And turned, amusingly and a bit surprisingly, to my a-ha songbook. Which I'd actually forgotten that I owned for the longest time... at least until I reassembled my songbook collection and got it all out and in easy reach for musical pursuits. The songbook in question is for a-ha's very first album, Hunting High and Low, released back in the 80's -- i.e., the album that had "Take On Me" on it, the song by a-ha that most people (at least, most people in the U.S.) remember.
We didn't actually get to play this song, but we did give it some heavy listening. And we took turns boggling over the incredible range of notes sung by a-ha's lead singer, Morten Harket, in this one song alone. "Take On Me" covers two and a half octaves. I asserted to the others that, like unto the situation with the lovely and talented Sean McCann, "Mortals are not meant to sing in the key of Morten."
One thing about the songbook's arrangement of that ditty did confuse us, though, since the range as written covered A below middle C clear up to the E two and a half octaves up. At first we wondered how the hell Mr. Harket was hitting that high note -- and then Dara, courtesy of her recent lessons with Kathryn, realized that sometimes people will actually write out music intended for tenor ranges an octave up and use the treble clef for it. So the arrangement we have for the song is written an octave above how Morten Harket was actually singing it.
Even so, we realized that at least back then the man was genuinely in an alto range for his voice. Now he's a tenor. Then, he was an alto.
Some joking discussion took place as to how we might actually play the song. I could almost hear a fiddle treatment of the beepy, techno-y synthesizer bits at the beginning and in between various sections of the song... though it took a bit of effort to actually try to explain to the others that what I was hearing in my head was not a fiddle trying to do the same short beepy sort of style of notes, but rather, a fiddle just whipping through it fast and light, like a fiddle can do. Cyn reported that she could kind of get an idea of how it might sound as well, though Fred also joked about learning it on the concertina -- which would be funny. And I figured, well hey, if the Paperboys could do a Celtic version of "Sexual Healing", we could do "Take On Me".
However, we weren't quite prepared to take on "Take On Me", that session. Mostly because I didn't know the chords yet. So we opted to put the song away till I had an opportunity to learn the chord progression.
So, having exhausted the possibilities for what Anna could play, we jumped over to purely vocal ditties -- and "The Chemical Worker's Song". We hadn't done this one in a very long while, and it was nice to get back to it.
The first take wasn't really a real take, since it just sort of 'happened', with lead singing sort of jointly shared between me and Mimi. I sang melody on the verses and kept jumping into harmony on the choruses. But I had to take a bit of effort to remember what order the verses occurred in, and initially left out the verse pertaining to "overtime and bonus opportunities galore".
Fred tried to fill in his version, though: "Well I'm in the navy and it's overtime I never fucking get".
Mimi plays more of a march rhythm than fans of GBS might be used to for this song, which makes for an interestingly different interpretation. We wound up singing it in a different key than the recorded version as well, at least at first, and the key we started with wound up not working well for Cyn's voice since she was trying to reconstruct the harmony she'd sung before and it didn't work in that key. So I had to go back to consulting GBS's recorded version for a point of reference for a key, and confirmed that we'd been singing lower than GBS's recorded version.
We tried that key, and it didn't work for Cyn either; taking it up a couple of steps till we reached A for a starting note, however, did work. This should be useful information for future attempts to play that song.
Lastly, we took another stab at "General Taylor" by the request of Dara, who just wanted to practice it... though she ruefully remarked afterward that next time she wanted to get in "General Taylor" somewhere besides the tail end of a session. Doing it that late in the session probably contributed to issues she had with tonality on that take, aside from her still being quite nervous about being lead singer on something. But we shall hopefully work it through!
The pie: although writing a Jam Report nearly a month late does tend to blur one's memory as to what sort of pie one ate that far back (and it doesn't help if there's no mention of the kind of pie on the session recording), if I recall correctly we had apple berry. Of course, one can also argue that since we've more than exhausted the repetoire of pies at the local grocery, they've begun to blur together anyway in our group consciousness. Mimi even put in a request for something besides pie for the next session.
More on that later,
Anna the Piper