One Foot in Front of the Other

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Greetings. I am new to the Hella Gems roster, but I hang out with the East Coast Hella Gems people in real life. The Hella Gems concept poses a challenge to me, as it is very difficult to compose, perform, record, and produce a new song on a weekly/biweekly basis and have it turn out the way you want to. I tend to spend much time trying to perfect my musical undertakings (keyword: trying), and such a schedule would easily drive me insane.

So, for the time being, I have decided to remove the composing step from the four-step process outlined above, thus reducing the emotional investment I put in each piece, by doing covers of songs by other artists. I view this as a chance to experiment with arrangements, production techniques, and to improve my singing (you will see what I mean).

I was inspired to take this approach after reading the Wall Street Journal and learning about some of Beck’s impromptu and odd covers of Velvet Underground songs.

My first entry is a song by a 1980′s synth-pop outfit called Bone Symphony. They only released one EP and recorded a song for the Revenge of the Nerds soundtrack. It is this latter item that I cover in this entry. It is a classic example of a 1980′s “fix-em-up” song, i.e. a song that is played over the montage that depicts the protagonists hatching some grand scheme and setting to work implementing it.

As those who know me will protest, I probably doubled my voice too much (however, I used no pitch correction). I couldn’t understand the lyrics on the original song , so I approximated them the best I could.