[coronadrop #14 in a series of previously unreleased songs—released here daily—until the quarantine is over or i run out of decent unreleased songs]

here’s yet another track from my lost virtual solo covers record “if i were you.”

i started explaining this story in the track notes for “fairy prince rainbow man” but the tldr; version is i started to make a cover record using only virtual instruments and samples. in 2003-2004. on a dual G4 MDD Mac with a digi 001. what the hell was i thinking?

the idea was that there would be no “live instruments” — everything was to be “virtual” — in fact, the only mics used would be for vocals, and on a number of the tunes i was going in deep on the treatments and vocoding, as i was smitten with logic 5 after five years of protools. (back then, every feature that comes standard with apple “logic studio" was a paid extra, and you needed to remember to remember to always bring that stupid logic XSkey dongle with you, which you never did. especially when you were driving 12 hours to another city to do overdubs. you kids today, you don’t know the half of it, and get off my lawn while you’re at it!)

sorry, where was i? so i was up to about six presentable songs and a good dozen more started when the hard drive with all the samples i had laboriously installed from AKAI ROMs and stuff cobbled off the internet crashed and burned. without a backup (which sadly is how we rolled back then, firewire drives were expensive &c.)

the clown cried. and was too exhausted to get it all back together, and besides had all these pop psychology tracks to work on and that was the real business at hand. the upside of all of this was learning the whole logic VST/AU methodology made future recording “easier” if not “better."

but i did find a jaz drive with scratch mixes of the work in progress.

and this is a rough version of what i did to gerry rafferty’s “right down the line,” the closest thing to a “famous” song amongst the obscurantist's breakfast of covers i envisioned.

what were some of the other songs on my list, you might ask?

furniture “i miss you” (which ended up on discount store)
bacharach and david “long day short night”
t-bone burnett “shut it tight”
vicky leandros “different from all the others"
chris warren “outside time”
winston tong “reports from the heart”
scritti politti “gettin’ havin and holdin’”
chris staig “honest love”
the joy of cooking “red wine at noon"
ron sexsmith “kiss of life”
jona lewie “kitchen at parties”
momus “god is a tender pervert”
michel pagliaro “some sing some dance”
and lee feldman’s “if i were you” (duh)

and a completely weird-ass mashup of graham parker’s “the weekend’s too short,” debbie deb’s “lookout weekend,” and wreckless eric’s “it’ll soon be the weekend” which sounded fantastic in my head but completely fell apart not long after i hit "record".

there are a few more that were tracked and mixed far enough to consider coronadropping, but i need to find and actually listen to the files to see how embarrassing they are.