Tag: cover songs

• Singing Neil Young’s “Razor Love” in a cloistered apartment in Maine

  When I first moved to Maine, it was the tail-end of the pandemic, January 2021, and the little bedroom I made inside an otherwise disheveled apartment was a strange refuge. I only lived there 8 months, but there was a certain peace to the room and it was possible to cross a lot of mental distance in the 10×10 space. I’d go from the room to the kitchen, to the porch to the neighborhoods, and that little corridor of movement was where a lot of things started, including l-o-v-e.

  As spring neared, I was recording things very offhand, just spurts of “feeling like it,” but they were turning out well. I’d add slide guitar accompaniment, drop a bag of white rice on the table for percussion, and a day later lip-sync and record my face on the laptop. These mini-projects felt more me than previous visuals, and more expressive than I’d felt with traditional songs in quite a while. I shared them on social media, especially in anticipation of releasing Raw Honey’s Riverbed album (see “Attic Stairs.“)

  I captioned them “Saturday night karaoke” or similar, so now I’m calling it a karaoke series. Here’s another one going up on the Big Web today.

  2024.12.28

• Singing Raw Honey’s “Attic Stairs” in a parking lot in Portland, Maine

  In the summer of 2019, Maggie, Luke and I seemed to practice every day. All three of us also cleaned houses for her mother’s business, and at night I cleaned dishes at a bar to save money for France. It was a meditative time and one of the few stretches when I strongly felt I’d loosened my grip on a sense of “self.” I used to lay on the grass in the backyard of the dirty apartment I shared with University of Michigan architecture students, simply reveling in a rare feeling of mattering less. I also “got” William Carlos Williams more than ever that summer.

  The Raw Honey album Riverbed came out in 2021, but I’d heard this song many times before, in living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens. Maggie was also an early witness of my own songs, by way of her sister Sarah Hopp, my great friend and the co-consciousness of Planet Made of Diamonds Twice the Size of Earth! I learned a lot about playing guitar (and swimming/picnicking) that summer, and was lucky enough to record with them.

  This is one of the most resonant songs I have heard about death, and it reaches me in an almost purely poetic space — Trying to remember the dead / Is like wind stirring the riverbed — an opening in which I feel immense gratitude for life and its troubles. It’s always felt like a song that exists a priori, or necessarily, and which was created by a person but is not really hers. I love this song and I recorded this ahead of Riverbed‘‘s release on Life Like.

  2024.12.14