Hello and welcome to another edition of the Laptop Sessions! It’s great to be back doing these songs again. I have so many that I want to record and they’ve been mostly successful so far. I’m even going back and remastering some of my old videos. My thought is this: I may lose the views that I had on the video before, but is anyone actually hanging around to watch these videos that look like they were recorded in the dark and inside an air conditioner? So, cleaning them up has been fairly easy to do and it seems to breathe some new life into them.
But today I bring you a new video in “She’s Got Rhythm”. This is the lead track off of the 1978 album, “M.I.U. Album”. This is one of the Beach Boys’ most panned albums, and for good reason. It’s so disjointed. Of course the songs aren’t bad (at least, in my opinion), but you could tell that Brian was fading away from his brief resurgence during the 15 Big Ones and Love You albums of the previous two years. The other members had a chance to add songs, but you didn’t get much input from Carl or Dennis on this one- you’d have to wait till 1979’s “L.A. (Light Album)”to hear more written by them. However, Dennis does get the lead on probably my favorite track on the album, “My Diane”. I don’t think I should cover that one, though- seems like it’s too personal and written for a very specific person for me to jump in.
So, I chose “She’s Got Rhythm” in keeping with one of the goals of the Laptop Sessions acoustic cover songs music video blog. This song is done in a slightly disco style and would probably turn some people off, especially four decades later. So, I thought I’d give it the full acoustic treatment…but still keep the falsetto because, why not? I’d be really interested to hear from folks to see if this song translated well to acoustic guitar and vocals. It just popped into my head one day while playing some songs on piano with my daughter and I knew the chords before I even started playing. And you can tell Brian wasn’t in command of the session for the original track because it’s in the key of D. If he was there, you know this would be in C#…
I hope you enjoy today’s Laptop Sessions cover song video. I have a couple more Beach Boys songs in the can that I’ll debut over the next few weeks. It won’t be easy gaining fans back after letting the site go dormant for so long, but it’s been fun igniting this passion once again! Stay tuned to my YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/jimfusco – I’m uploading new and newly-remastered videos all the time!