5 Songs I’d Love to Cover

Hello and happy (if slightly damp) Monday evening to you all.

I’ve been a busy temping bee this week, in week 4 of 7 of my contract as a data herder. These periodic lapses of sanity are necessary for my fiscal well-being, but as you know, I haven’t had time to actualise as many of my musical projects as I’d like and instead I have been making lists of things I’ll do when I have time again…

As the title of this weeks post has probably indicated, I want to talk about covers today. I’ve been slowly learning more, I now have a grand total of four confident covers learned that I can whip out at a moment’s notice (yes, yes, stop sniggering in the cheap seats…). Currently I’m competent to a reasonable degree at:

Braille  – Regina Spector

Exit Ghost – Faderhead

Merry Happy – Kate Nash

Someone Like You – Adele

I’m also halfway to competent at Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen, but that’s still only five songs, and I am feeling the need for a bigger repertoire. Not because I can’t write, but because pub gigs come more easily to people who can entertain the masses on a Saturday night. That said, perhaps these covers that I’d like to do would be too obscure..who knows. Anyway, here are the originals of the 5 covers I would currently most like to learn:

Raspberry Swirl – Tori Amos

The original of this is a full band, gritty, swirly, stompy dream of a track that I’ve danced along to, numerous times. I adore it. I also love the idea of turning it into a mellow, breathy, floaty piano and vocal track.

 

Enjoy the Silence – Depeche Mode

Speaking of the dream king’s girl, I know Tori covered this, and I’d never do as good a job, but I still want to. This has long been one of my favourite tracks ever, and I’d love to see what I could do with it.

 

Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls

I’ve been working on this one for years. I can’t get a decent replication on the piano of the jangly sound of the guitars in the original, so I always give up after trying fruitlessly for a bit to get something reasonable out of it. I think I need courage to do this one. It’s a song that means a lot to me, and I think that makes me afraid to take risks with it, but I will, one day, I will do it.

 

Crucify – Tori Amos

Yes, I know, another Tori song… it’s so deceptive though and it lures me in. Time and time again, I play up until the first chorus and then, then I can’t quite figure out how the rest of it should go. I lack Tori’s technical precision and decades of classical training and experience, so the best I can do is muddle something together that sounds vaguely competent. When I manage that much, I’ll let you know!

 

Bleed It Out – Linkin Park

I’m a sucker for taking a loud, stompy track and giving it a completely different interpretation. This is one track that I think would be incredible done with just piano and vocals. The lyrics are so vivid, it would be interesting to bring them forward more. I haven’t yet worked out the practicality of doing it, but I’m working on it. Shotgun opera, lock and load….

 

And there you have it.

In other news, EP mixing continues, song 6 is nearly actually a song, and everything else is pretty much together now. I’m very excited 🙂 I also played at the Rook and Gaskill in York last Wednesday, as part of Vinnie’s Live In Session, and had the great pleasure of meeting longtime fellow blogger and online friend Lucretia, who was in York for the evening, so this is a shoutout to her 🙂 Vinnie does this night on the last Wednesday of every month and it’s a superb chance to hear four great acts, I highly recommend it (although I highly recommend that you bagsy seats near the performance area at the back of the pub, as the pub does get crowed and hence noisy, early on in the night)

I’m going to sign off now, have a great week, see you next Monday!

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A Review of AGT and Other Stories

Yes, I know this is a day late (only one day late because of the bank holiday!). But, it will be extra long and have shedloads of content. So there!

I had an exciting start to my Bank Holiday. I played a set at Ainsty’s Got Talent – a local talent competition being run at York pub The Ainsty. I’m friends with the organiser and I must confess, she had to work to get me to agree to do it, since I usually find the adrenaline rush of competitions a tad uncomfortable, but I ended up having a great night – it was a fantastic experience having such a big (and slightly scary, though not in a bad way!) crowd to play to, and with only three songs with which to make my mark, it was a challenge to narrow down the set to something that would best match the mood.

I’m sad that I missed some of the acts. Friday night meant a dash back from work, and by the time we’d eaten, gathered gear, and made our way to the pub, some of the acts had already been up. Fortunately, the lovely organiser had the fortitude to film everything, so let me just say now that all videos were filmed by Caroline Grant of Le Grande Management. She did a cracking job, and a more welcoming host and organiser could not be wished for.

Without further ado, let me introduce the acts of Ainsty’s Got Talent, heat 5, in order of appearance:

Chrissy and Kirsty (Pole Dancing)

I tried pole dancing once. Dear god it’s hard. These girls have some awesome upper body strength, and the teamwork required for some of the moves is very evident in the video. A great, and unusual, opening act, beautifully choreographed and athletic to watch.

 

Meg Fowler (Singer-Songwriter)

This fourteen year old singer-songwriter had the audience singing along for much of her set, which included Jolene, featured below. Great vocals, instrumental competence, and a self assured performance for one so young.

 

Toni Feetenby (Vocalist) WINNER

This lady had the crowd in the palm of her hand from the start, with ambitious renditions of Let It Go, What’s Goin’ On and My Heart Will Go On. With bags of stage presence and confidence, she’ll go far, I’ve no doubt.

 

Melody Simpson (Vocalist)

Another young contestant, at just 12 years old, Melody took the stage and owned it, showing no signs of nerves in front of a massive crowd. Attitude and presence characterized her cracking and energy-filled performance.

 

Just Alam (Singer-Songwriter)

Alam performed a mixture of covers and originals in his strong vocal and acoustic guitar set. With his expressive voice and experienced presence, he brought the mellow to the Ainsty, and it was well done indeed. My favourite was actually his original, but the video wasn’t made available, so I’ve gone for my second favourite of his, a cover of Take It Easy.

 

Erm. Me. 

Can’t really review my set. No-one threw rotten veg, yadda yadda. I did Dark Side of Me (from Riptides), an a capella version of Perfect (originally by Fairground Attraction) and finished with a track off the new EP, Rota Fortunae. I’ll leave you with the latter:

 

James Witchwood (Fiddler) RUNNER-UP

One of my personal favourites of the night, this lad plays a mean, mean fiddle. And he sings. He blew us all away with his rendition of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. Here it is:

 

And that was Ainsty’s Got Talent. Heat 5 at any rate. There are another couple of heats to go, including the wildcard heat in which James will be competing for a place in the final, so if you’re free, I highly recommend going down and cheering the acts on!

The rest of the weekend passed in a haze of recovering from the adrenaline rush of Friday night, reading, watching silly movies (9 and The Hunger Games) and continuing to mix the EP. It’s going well I think, with four out of six tracks basically done, and the other two nearly there. I’m still trying to finalise a solution to selling digitally online, since I’ve had some issues with Selz (file names and metadata being lost on test downloads) and as yet no-one has come back to me about a resolution. Aside from that, and their pesky policy of not allowing sellers to set a price below £1 (no use at all if you are selling singles) they’re very good, and I’d really like to use them properly but at the moment the functionality and options just aren’t there. I’ll let y’all know how it goes.

And that’s me signing off for this installment. Have a great week!

All media in this post recorded by Caroline Grant/Le-Grande Event Management. For more videos of the night, please visit (and subscribe!) to Le-Grande Event Management’s YouTube Channel 🙂

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It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times

Good afternoon, dear readers, and welcome to another thrilling installment…

I don’t know about you, but for me it’s been One Of Those Weeks. Murphy’s Law had applied Murphy’s Law to itself (for 3 X 3 the amount of things going wrong) and by Saturday morning I was a quivering, gibbering ball under the duvet, muttering “please, no more” again and again and again and again…

Ok, it’s possible I have exaggerated slightly. Still, it was a bit of a pants week, redeemed only by free books from Waterstones thanks to obsessive points collection in months past, and free cake. Free cake makes just about anything better.

Today has thankfully been better, and I’m optimistic for a sunnier week! The tale of woe that is last week does however tie in well with today’s theme, suggested by a friend, to write about my best and worst gigs.

In the same way that bad news should always be delivered first, I’ll open with worst.

Worst Gig 1 – The Duchess, York

Yes. I’ve played the Duchess. No, it did not go well.

I was thrilled to be asked. I was approached after playing at York Pride, and honestly, I thought this was it, at least a medium sized break to get me going. It was a November gig, and I came down with an awful cough in September. I didn’t know at this point that I was asthmatic, all I knew was, I had a big gig coming up and I needed to get rid of the cough.

By the time the gig rolled round, I was demoralised and still coughing. So I geared myself up for my voice to let me down.

Oh, if only.

The event was an all day fundraiser gig. At the point I arrived, it was still mid afternoon and the venue was dead. Maybe 16 people in the whole room, including the sound engineer. Most of the room was made up of a group of my friends, many of whom were seeing me live for maybe the first or second time. I’m amazed any of them have ever come back since because I bombed utterly. But not vocally, oh no, my voice was fine. It was my accompaniment, I completely forgot how to play at ALL. My fingers became unresponsive limp sausages stapled to my sweaty, shaking palms. The cold sweat started on the first note, and remained until we left the venue, a very very long 45 minutes later, trickling down my back like a trail of shame. It was unremittingly awful.

Witnesses on the day tell me it “wasn’t that bad”, but I know, and they know, that they are speaking out of love and telling a very big white lie. And no-one could flagellate me like I could anyway!

Lesson learned: Rehearsal, until utter boredom and beyond, is an artists best friend. Muscle memory can be relied on when stage fright has ripped out every other vestige of ability.

And so you can see how far I’ve come, here’s the only even remotely decent recording to come out of that gig:

Worst Gig 2 – An Unnamed Rugby Club Somewhere in the North of England

So this has a joint placement as worst gig, but for entirely different reasons. My 30 minute set was absolutely flawless.

I was asked by a friend to play this one, he assured me it was his local and it would be great. Here’s what went wrong:

It was a Rugby club……

 

 

…..On a Friday night.

I had, at that point, zero covers in my set. And most of you, I imagine, are pretty familiar with my style of music, especially a couple of years ago, before I learned which chords were the “happy” ones. The set was pretty introspective. Not sad, exactly, but not really a sing-a-long jukebox of chart hits. But it was all I had, I’d agreed to play, and the show had to go on.

There were about 40 people in the room. Two of them clapped, and my partner was one of those. There was a gentleman at the bar deeply occupied with imbibing a bright pink liquid that I have never seen sold behind a bar, not before or since. And at the end, one of the locals came up to me, and said: “You’ve got a lovely voice, love, but that was wrist-slittingly depressing”.

Erm. Thanks. I think.

Leason learned: Know the audience and tailor your set! 

My only consolation was my friend, whose local it was, had almost as hard a time as I did…

Best Gig – Malt Cross, Nottingham

This was the outright winner for best gig. I loved the venue, the other acts on the night were incredible, and however I sounded from the audience, The sound engineer wasn’t shy about using the “talent” button on the monitors (reverb to you and me!) so monitors made me sound like the biggest god-damned diva in the world. It was awesome. This was the first gig that made me feel like I could actually play live and it reminded me why I started performing in the first place.

For a reminder, I blogged about it here and there’s a radio show about it all too!

Honourable Mentions for Best Gig

City Screen – Everything I’ve done there. It’s always been to a packed room, and the sound engineers there are fab. It’s just got such a lovely atmosphere every time.

Vinnie and the Stars Fundraiser at The Winning Post (April 18th 2014) – Great crowd, great acts and supporting Vinnie was a blast.

And that concludes this weeks blog post. I hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Now, I’m off to rehearse!

Casee is playing again at The Winning Post on Sunday 4th May, with CATSELF, a visiting artist from Finland, and the fabulous Floydian tribute band The Bleeding Hearts and Artists. 

 

 

 

 

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Being “Appealing”…

Welcome to another exciting episode of my blog – I hope you are all well out there and noone got flooded in the recent bad weather!

I come to you today to share a couple of videos, and to talk to you about one of my favourite rant topics – my critics. It’s inevitable that one gets critics. The instant you put any body of  work out into the big wide world, it becomes a candidate for judgement. Now, this is not a problem, in fact I used to deliberately upload things to Slice the Pie back when it actually displayed all of people’s comments, and bask in the glow from the haters. Great way to thicken one’s skin, and to learn that what you think is awesome when you are knocking it together in your home studio might be abysmally amateur to someone else. It’s a valuable experience and a great reminder that not everyone will like what you do; I used to get great praise and damning criticism in the same set of reviews, often beautifully interleaved amongst the “great guitar!” comments (in a track consisting of piano and vocals, but hey, I’m gratified that my guitar playing pleased them….!)

The point is, critics are valuable. They keep you on your toes, perform the aforementioned skin-thickening duties and generally remind you frequently and in a timely fashion that you are not existing solely in a bubble of your own creative genius.

Unfortunately, there is a line where critique becomes hounding, and where as an artist, one has to decide how much to take on board, and concludes that the comments are no longer constructive. Lately, I have had a variety of… interesting “questions” posed to me on Reverbnation. Of course, I signed up to this, enabled it, and I have no problem at all with genuine questions. Unfortunately, for various reasons (one of which being that in order to sign your name on a question, you have to register – and a number of people I know won’t do that because they already have so many accounts, etc – a rant for another time I feel!) the questions can be posed under the “anonymous” flag, which leads to abuse.

I have lost count of the comments that I have chosen not to publish because they are offensive and there is no sensible way to respond to them other than to ignore them. But this is NOT a rant about trolls. There were some other comments that stood out to me.

One was “I only want to make you more appealing”. More appealing to whom? Let’s get something straight. I do not write for you. I don’t write for my mother, or father, partner, siblings, friends, A&R, or even God (sorry, Dude). I write for me. My songs are about creative self expression. They aren’t about giving you some sort of gratification, either because you can pick them apart or because they’re the soundtrack to your wet dream. I’m afraid I am entirely selfishly motivated, and I am not a commercial product.

If you, as a happy side effect, happen to LIKE my work, great! If you want to support it, even better, and I will do everything in my power to make you feel appreciated for being kind enough to indulge my selfish creativity. If this attitude of mine means I am never commercially viable as an artist, than so be it. I’d rather not be commercially viable, but remain true to myself.

Another was “why do you mess with tunes?”. I loved this one. It’s because they’re MY tunes and it’s my responsibility to present them in the way that I think is appropriate. One of the aspects of that is practicality and working within limitations. This isn’t Hollywood, nor am I a multimillionaire with a top of the range studio, hundreds of session musicians at my beck and call, and dozens of lackeys to run out and buy me a double whipped cream, half-fat, cinnamon and virgin calf’s milk latte. I have me, a piano, Logic Pro, and occasionally a good friend or my partner will hold a camera for me or look after the website, or generally be another pair of hands. I rely on my own problem solving, and the kindness of those closest to me, and I’m tremendously lucky to have the support I do. Also, I might mess with a tune because I don’t like the original. Or it’s a Tuesday. Or I want a dubstep/trancehouse/deathmetal version of “Mary”. Come to think of it…

In short, I always welcome genuine, constructive comments but bear in mind that my creative identity isn’t going to change just because you think it should, or someone else does it differently. Trying to please everyone in the world is a surefire shortcut to the looney-bin, and I have too many songs to write.

If you sat through that rant without falling asleep or requiring intravenous stimulants, please accept my heartfelt congratulations, and here for you are a couple of new videos, recorded over the last couple of weeks:

I Miss You (When It’s Raining) – The live arrangement

World Reborn

And that concludes this blog post! Stay safe out there and see you again soon 😀 xxx

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