By Chris Moore:

As a special treat for all you Fusco-Moore music blog faithfuls, this post is in honor of Laptop Sessions founder Jim Fusco’s wedding to Becky Daly over the weekend.  That’s right; as of July 25th, 2009, Jim is no longer a single man.

Sorry, ladies…

As part of my wedding gift to them, I sifted through the 10,000 plus songs on my iTunes and created a playlist to commemorate their marriage.  As you skim through the bands and titles below, you’ll find that the theme is pretty obvious — two people getting together in a relationship (1, 2), getting married (5, 7, 11), and the new life that follows (8, 10, 12, 14).  Of course, there’s some mention of Saturday night (4) and the bonus tracks are all about the honeymoon — can you guess where that’s going to be taking place?

I hope you enjoy the playlist rundown, and I encourage you to leave comments for the newlyweds here on this post!

TRACK LISTING:

1 )  “Got to Get You Into My Life” – The Beatles
2 )  “Better Together” – Jack Johnson
3 )  “Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do” – Huey Lewis & The News
4 )  “Almost Saturday Night” – Gene Clark & Carla Olson
5 )  “Chapel of Love” – The Beach Boys
6 )  “I’ll Always Love You (Day After Day)” – Dean Martin
7 )  “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck” – Elvis Presley
8 )  “What Love Has Joined Together” – The Temptations
9 )  “Really Love You” – Paul McCartney
10) “Ideal Woman” – William Shatner
11) “Wedding Song” – Bob Dylan
12) “A New Life For Us” – The Now People
13) “Satisfied” – Ringo Starr
14) “Believe In Life” – Eric Clapton
15) “This is Love” – George Harrison
16) “One True Vine” – Wilco

BONUS TRACKS:

17) “The Honeymoon Song” – The Beatles
18) “The Hula Hula Boys” – Warren Zevon
19) “Rocking Chair in Hawaii” – George Harrison
20) “Rock-A-Hula Baby” – Elvis Presley
21) “Hawaii” – The Beach Boys

For Bob Dylan / Dead Weather chords & lyrics, CLICK HERE!

By Chris Moore:

Hello and welcome to yet another delay for the “double header” I promised last week or (technically) two weeks ago.  But I have a good reason for holding off!  Tonight, I’ve recorded “New Pony,” one of my least favorite Bob Dylan songs, because a brand new cover version was released on last week’s Dead Weather debut album.

First, I’ll give a little background on the original version of the song.  “New Pony” was first released on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal.  To give you a little context here, Dylan had recently released Blood on the Tracks and Desire, arguably two of his best albums.  The year 1975 found him fully engaged in the Rolling Thunder Revue along with such artists as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, poet Allen Ginsberg, and others.  Although he temporarily revived a different incarnation of the Revue in 1976, this phase of Dylan’s musical career was pretty much over by 1977.

This is not to say that life wasn’t busy for him.  This was right around the time that his marriage to Sara Dylan was breaking down and the divorce proceedings began.  A lot — perhaps too much — has been written about these personal aspects. 

Street Legal was the product of a few weeks of sessions involving a select group of musicians that Dylan had recently worked with.  Although his past two albums had met with critical success and his subsequent album, 1979′s Slow Train Coming, would earn him his first Grammy award, Street Legal has generally been lost in the valley between these two peaks.

Personally, I have always liked this album.  Sure, the female background singers come across as a bit cheesy at times (have you heard “Baby, Stop Crying”?) and the instrumentation can be a bit much at times, but there are some great songs.  “Changing of the Guards” is one of my favorite album openers and boasts a rare fade-in.  “Is Your Love in Vain?” and “True Love Tends to Forget” are fantastic Dylan deep cuts.  And “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is a narrative wrapped in the best, darkest mood you’ve ever felt.  (Jerry Garcia recorded a great version of the latter.)

As for “New Pony”?  Well, it generally ranks as one of my least favorite Dylan recordings of all time, and certainly on this record.  In fact, it’s the very rare track that I may occasionally skip when listening to the album.  Why it was placed in the number 2 slot, I’ll never know.

That being said, let’s flash forward to 2009.  Last week, the Dead Weather released their debut album, Horehound.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with this group, this is a side project band composed of the White Stripes’ Jack White (drums, some vocals, acoustic guitar on one track), the Kills’ Alison Mosshart (lead vocals), Queens of the Stone Age’s Dead Fertita (guitar, etc.), and Jack Lawrence (bass, etc.).  I really liked last year’s Raconteurs album (Jack White and Jack Lawrence’s other side project band), so I figured I would give this one a shot as well.

Long review short, I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be.  (My one-sentence review is coming shortly!)  That being said, the album certainly has its moments, and for me, one of the best moments is track seven when they cover Dylan’s “New Pony.”

This is an excellent example of a band you wouldn’t necessarily think of as being heavily influenced by Bob Dylan turning around and pulling off a stand-up interpretation of one of his songs.  After hearing it, I thought that this song fit better on this album than it did on Street Legal.  In that sense, I was happy to assign “New Pony” to a better place in my estimation of Dylan’s catalog of songs.

So, without further ado, I submit to you my acoustic rendition of the song as a send-up to the 1978 Dylan version and a tip of the hat to the brand-new 2009 version by the Dead Weather.  I found that I was psyched to learn this ridiculously easy (at least chord-wise) song.  Anyone who visits the Laptop Sessions on any regular basis knows that I’m no stranger to a Bob Dylan cover song, but I never thought I’d be recording this one.

Well, at least not until I ran out of all the other ones in 2045 or so…

I hope you enjoy this, and be sure to stop back tomorrow for Jim Fusco’s Tuesday post, a couple days later for Jeff Copperthite’s Thumpin’ Thursday, and later this week for at least one more post from your truly.  (I’ve got so much to say about other music and non-music related topics, but I think this is quite enough for one post!)

See you next session!

By Jeff:

You know, one side effect of performing for laptopsessions.com is that you tend to learn a lot about the bands that you cover.

I knew that I wanted to do this song at some point because it is a stereotypical “alternative” song from the 90′s, and it was in the top ten of singles when it came out.  I knew that the moog riff is cool, and that I was definitely not going to include it in my performance.

I’m talking about a band called “The Rentals” (which for some reason make me think of the B52′s, but I digress) (Ok, it also makes me think of “The Wonders” from “That Thing You Do”, but I digress again) (Nope, nothing else, just thought i’d digress in threes).  And today, I learned that it is and was fronted by Weezer’s own Matt Sharp.  I guess I should’ve known since the styles are markedly similar.

Tonight’s performance is an acoustic one of a song that doesn’t really sound like it’d be good acoustic.  I’d be better off breaking out my bass and fuzzing the sound up.  Still, the spirit of the sessions must remain!  The song is “Friends of P” from their album “Return of the Rentals”.  You’ll recognize it if you don’t already when you hear it.

I hope you notice I did get a Twitter, and I promise to update it more if I get more followers.  Hopefully, however, you’ve taken that PSA into account.

Until next time fine folks, I’ll see you then!

By Jim Fusco:

Could it be Jim Fusco covering a woman’s song…in the original key??  Then you KNOW it’s the Laptop Sessions acoustic cover songs music video blog- the BEST music video blog ever created!

This is a great song, isn’t it?  It’s off of Carole (not to be confused with “Carol”) King’s classic hit album, “Tapestry”.  I’ll admit that I don’t have the album and just know the single from hearing it many times on the radio.  But, after hearing what a great tune it is (you know, actually just sitting and listening to it), I think I may give the album a try.  It’s a fairly simple song and reminds me (especially the ending, which ends on the same chord and with the same pattern) of a song my brother Mike and I wrote a long time ago called “Stuck In A Dream”.  You can listen to that song, which is off of the “Meaningless: Echoes of Dreams” sessions, by clicking HERE!  We wrote that song about six or seven years ago, so you know that this song, even though it uses some great Major 7th chords, is still pretty simple.  On the piano, it’s much easier than it is on the guitar.

But, it’s got some great guitar parts in the original recording- a very cool solo.  Plus, it’s got that nifty little piano riff thrown in there, which again, for some reason, strikes me as something only a rudimentary songwriter would put in.  You know, someone that’s just tinkering around with the piano and came up with it.

So, I finally do a song from a female artist and here I am picking it apart, calling it amateurish.  No, I don’t mean that at all.  That’s one of the reasons why I want to hear the rest of the “Tapestry” album- if some of the other songs strike me as “professional”, I’ll know she came up with this song on purpose, and I do believe that’s the case.

This is a pretty powerful song, especially the part about “not trying”.  Too many relationships fail not because the people weren’t compatible, but because they just stopped trying.  Effort is truly the number one factor in a relationship, in my opinion.  I mean, this song isn’t saying what I’m really thinking right now- I’m getting married in less than two weeks and, contrary to what everyone insists on telling me, I’m full of hope and happiness for this.  I’ve promised time and time again that I will always put as much effort as possible into my relationship, as it’s the single most important thing to me.  Not music, not anything else- my relationship with my family (which will include my new wife) and my closest friends.

The way this song relates to me right now is that I kind of feel I’m not getting the same effort back from some of the people I consider close.  And some, like the song says, are irreparable.  That’s not to say that myself and the other person won’t be happy again- we certainly will.  It just won’t be as a result of one another.  The only thing I can hang my hat on at the moment that makes me feel any better is the “fact” (at least from my point of view) that the decisions that got it to this point were not mine at all- if it were up to me, everything would’ve stayed the same.  But, alas, just as Carole King sings, it’s just too late, baby.

I hope you enjoy my acoustic rendition of this classic song tonight.  I had a b***** of a time getting it right, as I must’ve done about twenty takes and even after I got the perfect one, I realized it had all kinds of inexplicable pops and clicks in the audio, which I’m trying to fix now.  I hope you can listen past the imperfections and hear one of my better performances underneath.  Have a great week and stay tuned for Chris’ post from the Dylan concert tomorrow and Jeff and Chris later on!