“Laughing” (The Guess Who Cover)

Hello everyone and welcome to another new edition of the Laptop Sessions with Jim Fusco!  I’m excited to bring you this new acoustic cover song music video tonight from a band I absolutely loved growing up.

You see, in my early years, CDs were just becoming popular.  My father, being the music fan he is, was constantly buying music on CDs so he could have a pristine digital copy.  Fortunately for me, I got to hear many “Best Of” albums when he got them.  So, even though he probably had a couple Guess Who vinyl LPs, listening to these old hits on CD was like hearing them again for the first time.  So, as a kid, I was really into bands like the Monkees, the Moody Blues, and The Guess Who- and my love for them lives on today!

I’ve wanted to play the Guess Who song “Laughing” for quite a while now.  But, I could never really figure out the intricate opening section.  The “chords” are actually just augmented versions of one chord (based around an “A” chord).  So even though they all sound like different chords, it’s just a matter of moving one finger up or down one fret!  That’s pretty easy to play, but not so easy to figure out.  Songs like this, to me, raise a flag.  Songs that have these funny, intricate chord progressions (like making interesting variations on one chord) are almost always done like this: the guitar part came first and the rest of the song came later.  That is, Burton Cummings of the Guess Who was probably sitting down with his guitar, playing that opening section.  From there, he added those variations and all of a sudden, a song came to him!  That’s in contrast to the other form of songwriting (which I’ve been doing, but takes much longer to compile a full list of songs) where a tune pops into your head.  Then, you head on over to your guitar or piano to figure out the chords that go to it.

Either way of writing a song is fine by me (though my brother Mike is very much a purist for the “pop into your head” method), and I think songs like “Laughing” prove that fooling around with a couple of chords on the guitar can result in a big hit song.

The vocals are also great on “Laughing”.  That goes for both the soulful lead and the good backing vocals.  This song is pretty dynamic, too- it has three distinct tempos.  Plus, I think it’s the only song I’ve ever heard with in-tune laughing!

So, Christmastime is upon us.  Personally, I had an incredibly busy Thanksgiving weekend.  Between our two Thanksgiving get-togethers, the Jets game/TNA Wrestling night, midnight shopping at the outlets and other stores, another family get-together and sleepover Friday, a party and bar-hopping for my brother in law’s birthday on Saturday, I was POOPED by Sunday!  We finally got to put all the Christmas stuff up in the house and I must say, it looks pretty great.  I’m so excited for this Christmas- it promises to be (gift-wise, at least) one of the best yet.  I’m holding out hope for getting a couple of different gifts.  I’ll be posting on December 16th and the 30th, so I’ll be able to share the rundown of all my Christmas presents then!

I hope you enjoy tonight’s music video post of “Laughing” by the Guess Who.  If you know it, then you know it’s a classic tune.  If you don’t know it yet, then I think you’ll really dig it!  Have fun shopping and I’d love to hear from everyone how their Christmas season is going so far!  See you in a couple weeks for an all-new acoustic cover song music video!

“These Eyes” (The Guess Who Cover)

Well, that was officially a project and a half. If you’re a regular Laptop Sessions Music Video Blog visitor, you probably wondered where the heck we went these past couple of days. Well, our Store was temporarily hacked by those people that send out the annoying “King of Nigeria” newsletters. So, we got tagged for SPAM, which caused our entire lineup of seven music websites to go down. We were locked out.

Of course, we kept our “One Cover Song Video A Day” streak alive on YouTube and are making up for lost time now. Our Google rankings (that we’ve obviously been working so hard for) are slipping or gone, and even some of our link partners have removed our link because they couldn’t find theirs on our site.

Anyway, we need to move away from that. I made changes that will hopefully prevent these kind of attacks from happening again- I especially didn’t need any help from the idiots I used to work with. Of course, we’re going to keep doing database backups of everything on our site just in case. We’ve worked literally thousands of combined hours on these sites and simply cannot afford to lose anything.

So, getting back on track, we have an acoustic cover song tonight from yet another “new” band to the Laptop Sessions: the Guess Who! This is one of their most famous songs, perhaps behind “American Woman” in popularity. “These Eyes” is known for its great muted organ/keyboard sound in the beginning of the song, which I’ve adapted for guitar. I think it came out great!

You may be thinking, “I’ve heard this song somewhere…” Well, if you’ve seen the joyously stupid movie “Superbad”, you might remember “These Eyes” from that scene where the kid, Evan, is forced to sing for all those stoned men. He chooses this song and sings a pretty hilarious version that all the guys seemed to love.

Well, my version, I hope, is much less hilarious. So, I hope you enjoy tonight’s cover song here on the Fusco-Moore Productions Music Video Blog! Hopefully we’ll REALLY see you tomorrow this time and get back to normal fast!