While going through songs to send to someone I found this cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” that I did back in May. To accompany it, here is me doing my best Kate Bush eyes in 2009 (when I had unfortunately short hair).
Last week while I was reeling from low blood sugar while waiting for takeout food (never the best time to make conversation) I told Tyler Jackson of Foam Castles that I’d covered one of his songs. To me, this was a passing comment since I record more covers than original songs these days, but he was interested in hearing it and said he’d never heard of someone covering a Foam Castles song before, which surprised me since those songs are terribly catchy and tend to get stuck in my head. So after I ate something and was feeling more steady I opened that garageband file and re-vamped it to present now, for the curious, a link to my soundcloud page where you can stream and download for free my cover of “Horticulture Friends.” Enjoy, kids: http://soundcloud.com/thesamovars/horticulture-friends-cover
I got a bill this morning from my auto insurance company and it reminded me of just how much money my car is strangling out of me lately. I figured it was a good excuse to repost the video of me singing “My Car Is Trying To Kill Me” (as if I need an excuse these days).
Happy Birthday, Bryan Bruchman! As per your request here is a cover of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me.” As I wrote in the video, I’m sorry I don’t look like Taylor Swift and I apologize for my “country” accent.
Mad Ophelia is dead. She had to die because, after having her songs sacrificed at the altar of Gin Circus, there wasn’t anything left of her. But enough of my poetry—Mad Ophelia was eighteen year old me and, frankly, other than the songs I let Alex turn into guitar-driven tunes for Gin Circus the catalogue is pretty embarrassing to me. It was written with a self-important bent in the dorm rooms and common areas of the Maine College of Art and listening to it now the recording seems not only unprofessional but so stilted it’s sometimes hard to listen to. Last I checked there were still two copies of the album left at Strange Maine. While I secretly hope someone finds them years from now, I also wish they’d stay there and gather dust. There are few things more embarrassing than teenage poetry.
So that you know what I’m talking about, here’s a Mad Ophelia track called “Redemption at Dawn.” Check out the standard Garageband loops and spoken references to a film that Roger Ebert called “a conventional movie that never convinces us that it needed to be made.” I’ll be impressed with you if you figure the source of the quote at the end of the song out.
This cover of “Tik Tok” was recorded for Bryan Bruchman’s birthday in 2010. He loved it and wanted to put it online but considering it’s absolutely the opposite of what I’m trying to do with my music I protested and it remained on my computer and his and was largely forgotten. Today, I played it for my friend Rio and he not only loved it too but said I should post it on my tumblr because it would be hilarious for anyone who knows me and knows my normal style of music to hear it. So, ridiculous as it is (I turned auto tune up to 100% and purposfully sang in a nasal voice when I recorded it) here is my cover of Ke$ha’s song “Tik Tok.” Listen to it with a sense of fun, and don’t judge me too harshly because of it.
When I’m not singing/writing/drawing/whatever poor artsy thing I’m doing, I’m a tour guide at Victoria Mansion here in Portland, Maine. This morning, I was interviewed for local WMTW Channel 8’s morning show about the Mansion’s history. Watch the video linked in the post’s title to learn about the museum and to see how awkward I look at 6:30am
