By Jim Fusco:

Welcome, everyone, to another Laptop Sessions acoustic cover song music video!  The plan is to hold another recording session with my fellow “Traveling Acai Berries” later this week, but for now, I bring you the second video from our last session two weeks ago.  Unfortunately, I still can’t bring myself to drop the $60 to get the Beatles Rock Band yet (that new mortgage looms large in the foreground) and the same goes for the remastered box set, which I’m just dying to hear.

Tonight, our video is “Eight Days A Week”, another addition to our collection of Beatles cover songs.  It’s funny how this one became a video- Steve (whose shoulder is shown in this video) said, “Hey Jim- play a whole bunch of D notes on your guitar rapidly and let me try something.”  Sure enough, within a few seconds, we started the song.  Fast-forward a couple minutes (and a little discussion on harmony parts) and you had our fellow band member Chris C. sight-reading sheet music and playing the melody on his mandolin.  That’s him there in the center of the video, transposing notes on the fly.

I love the way the song songs with the two guitars and the mandolin.  You can really hear the mandolin part in the second half of this cover video and it adds such a cool dynamic.  We’ve got some great videos planned that will feature the mandolin, which I’m pretty excited about.  I will forever be a chord player (and improv. soloist) on the mandolin, so it’s cool to play with someone that can translate sheet music into a mandolin part.

Steve and I combined for some great singing in this video, if I do say so myself.  For some reason, I’m singing this with so much confidence and we had some nice parts together, especially on the “Eight days a week, I lo-uh-uh-uh-ove you” part.  And, I feel so much more easy-going when Steve’s playing guitar with me because I don’t have that feeling that I have to be the entire band.  I can strum, learn some licks, etc.  Very exciting stuff!

On a personal note, things are going well, but I don’t know how- we’re tearing the condo up, getting ready to sell things for some extra pre-house cash and working on getting the condo “rental-ready”.  That’s in addition to working and doing extra night and weekend work to ensure we’re okay financially when we move into our new place about a month and a half from now.  Thankfully, Becky is always one to look on the bright side with a sense of knowing- I’m not a fan of those who just see the rosy side of things for the sake of seeing it that way…

Anyway, I kind of wish I had eight days in a week so I could get all this stuff done.  Thankfully, some aspects of life (job, marriage, family) are stable now, so it makes dealing with the unstable things in life (like living your life by the whim of a mortgage company that doesn’t answer the phone) that much more bearable.

I’ll look forward to our next recording session on Friday and hopefully we’ll be back with new videos next Tuesday night.  Hey, maybe this time we can finally introduce the fourth Acai Berry…but we’ll all have to wait and see.  Until then, have a great week!