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This is a collaborative project involving anybody who wants to be a part of manipulating, transforming, building on, or subverting Jad Fair 1 2 and 3.
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MP3
MP3 2.6 MB • 128 kbps • 2:52
Story behind the song
This is the most conventionally song-like piece of the three Jad Fair sent me back in the mid-80s... I thought that he kind of sang all through it, and there wasn't much a person could do to fit something new in there. But I had the idea of trying to loop the space between the verses, extending it enough that a person could do a Portuguese translation of what he's singing following each verse with the translation.
It seems like doubling everything like that would really stretch it out (it has that effect when I listen to it) - but it's still under 3 minutes long...
It turns out there's a 4 bar intro that is the same chord progression as he sings over through the whole thing, and it sounds fairly natural. I thought this was really goofy and weird, but it's actually quite regular. I added some percussion to help cover the splices, and mostly as a guide for my edits. I'm not sure I'm too wild about it. I feel it sits uneasily on it, perhaps because he has some percussion thing going on in his original that i don't really understand, possibly involving some triplets) It started out as a loop of a drum track from a Beat Happening song, and I added some thing things. It would be vastly preferable to have a real percussionist, somebody who might be able to tease out what his original intention was. It might be easier for somebody with an instrument without fixed stops (say, a violinist) to figure out tonal parts to add. I have no idea.
And I'm not sure I'm too wild about the effect of the whole thing - the last couple of verses are pretty ad lib, and not sure they'd be easy to translate, or even worth translating!
I was afraid the loops would sound artificial, but actually they sound fairly convincing. But I wonder if artificial sounding loops might be more interesting.
These are just ideas... I thought I could throw some out. An entirely different approach would be fine. I only have a couple of hours into this, no big deal
I had a couple more ideas...
1. I could splice in 2 bar segments (rather than 8) so it could be more of a call and response type thing.... so it would be something like:
Cry me a river (cry me a river)
Cry me a lake (cry me a lake)
Billy found a mud puddle
Oh, goodness sake
[i don't know how to make this work, probably just leave it as it is without inserting extra bars]
Oh my
[two open bars to testify]
I could imagine it as a Gospel-type thing! a choir would be good for this approach.
2. Just perform it as a cover song - not any of this splicing and dicing stuff that I'm trying to do, but just a new recording, maybe live, sitting outside a cafe, performed on banjo and guitar, or something
The way I have it figured, he's playing two bars of C (with lots of dissonnence - a result of an alternative tuning to his guitar, or fingering the chords in an unusual way, I have no idea) then two bars of D... each verse 8 bars long, it's very regular and the tempo is pretty steady. Later on, the pattern gets a little more irregular. But you can do it however you hear it!
It still seems to me like an interesting idea to use his tracks as the foundation for multiple different offspring projects... same (or at least half the same) DNA, but different depending on who the other parent is, and the environment they grow up in... to extend the metaphor
Lyrics
4 bars intro
Cry me a river
Cry me a lake
Billy found a mud puddle
Oh, goodness sake
Oh My
(8 bars)
Cry me a river
Cry me a ocean
I got sunburned,
hand me that lotion
Oh My
(8 bars)
Cry me a river
Cry me a puddle
I'm gonna go out
and buy myself a french poodle
Oh My
(8 bars)
Cry me a river
Cry me a river
oh, I just -
I walked on some wood and got a sliver
Oh My
(8 bars)
Cry me a river
No, cry me a pond
Ah, I think I'm gonna
Go swimming in a pond
Oh My
Chorus
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