I guess I’ve started a kind of long-term project — recording covers of songs that were influential in my musical development. The first was 1963’s Surfer Girl. This one is Mixed-up, Shook-up, Girl from 1964 (recorded by Patty & the Emblems, possibly the earliest hit co-written by Leon Huff, who later achieved legendary status as half of the song-writing-producing team of Gamble and Huff).
I made a “studio” version of my song (Own Biggest Fan), after having recorded live version last month. The lyrics, production notes and embedded video for the new version are here. The YouTube video, shot with my still-working low-resolution Flip camcorder, and edited with Final Cut Express, is embedded below.
I’ve been working on a new song, “Own Biggest Fan,” since November 2011. I made a live version — just me and my guitar recorded with a single mic — on June 1, 2012. The YouTube video can be found here.
Surfer Girl was written by Brian Wilson in 1961 and released by the Beach Boys in 1963. I decided to record it “live” on GarageBand, playing keyboards and singing the lead vocal simultaneously. This was all documented with the iSight camera on my iMac (I also recorded a live version of a new original song with guitar and vocal recorded simultaneously, but that one is not yet finished). I then recorded three tracks of background vocals, superimposed some lip-synching Flip video clips, and posted it to YouTube. YouTube has an interesting attitude towards such intellectual property violations (although the lyrics of Surfer Girl are only marginally intellectual by any rational standard) — on a case by case basis, they permit someone like me to post such copyrighted material online, as long as I acknowledge that the copyright belongs to others and allow the copyright owners to place an advertisement for an MP3 of the original song adjacent to the video. No problem — you could do far worse than to purchase the Beach Boy’s original version of this song.
About 30 years after we recorded this song, ROLLO’s Heyday of the Automobile is now a YouTube video. For lyrics and other song minutiae, go to the YouTube site; otherwise, just check it out here:
Pretty good dragon this year: my 10-minute YouTube video is here.
First-year architecture students at Cornell University carry their dragon to the Arts Quad March 16, 2012
I’ve just posted two new Milstein Hall construction videos (Nos. 8 and 9), describing the curtain wall, stone veneer, and aluminum soffit panels. Milstein Hall at Cornell University was designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA. The index for all my Milstein Hall construction videos is here. The two new ones can be viewed below:
The seventh in my ongoing series of Milstein Hall construction videos is now online:
The index for all my Milstein Hall contruction videos is here.
Milstein Hall, at Cornell University, was designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA.
The idea for this new song was triggered by my recent experience signing up with Facebook. Once signed up, I was informed by my younger brother that having only 9 or 10 friends is pretty pathetic. I would periodically check out my Facebook homepage and see that Dan and Eric were now friends, or that Kris and Miki were now friends, which only heightened my sense of insecurity (these thoughts were transcribed into the song’s lyrics in a more-or-less literal way). For the record, Stradlater’s roommate is Holden Caulfield. Lyrics, production notes, and a YouTube video are here.
Also for the record, the video was shot with my low-resolution Flip camcorder and my iMac built-in iSight camera recording simultaneously; the iSight clip is then superimposed onto the desaturated (B&W) Flip clip in Final Cut Express. Various iMac images, some taken by me and others taken from a Google image search, are also interwoven into the video, with the iSight clip always superimposed. Several images taken from the web, appropriately distorted via PhotoShop to match the perspectival conditions they appear in, can be seen every now and then superimposed onto the moving images — the original 45 of Eleanor Rigby rests on the shelf between my speakers; and a copy of Alice in Wonderland or Catcher in the Rye sits on my desk.
Stradlater’s roommate © 2011 Jonathan Ochshorn (remixed Sept. 2, 2019)
VERSE 1:
looking for a friend is tough
do you know of any
nine or ten is not enough
when others have so many
dan and eric are now friends
so are kris and miki
i can’t tell what this portends
maybe i’m too picky
CHORUS 1:
never thought i’d end up like eleanor rigby
wondering what went wrong
waiting at the window screen for someone to pick me
singing where do i belong
VERSE 2:
like alice in the rabbit-hole
in the deep well she falls
mr carroll couldn’t know
that what were wells are now walls
what size do you want to be
the caterpillar asked her
doesn’t matter much to me (she said)
but changing’s a disaster
CHORUS 2:
never thought i’d end up like poor little alice
looking for some fun
everyone she meets is crazy or dripping with malice
and there’s nothing to be done
BRIDGE
i’m not the kind to complain
i’ll take the good with the bad the sun with the rain
but will this rain never end
here it comes again
VERSE 3:
holden’s in a jam again
life sucks what a pity
school’s done so he takes the train
back to new york city
all the women he meets there
leave him sad and lonely
he tells himself he doesn’t care
cause everyone’s a phony
CHORUS 3:
never thought i’d end up like stradlater’s roommate
feeling so alone
finally gets the nerve to call up jane for a new date
but her mom picks up the phone
CHORUS 3 (repeated):
never thought i’d end up like stradlater’s roommate
feeling so alone
hanging it up after calling jane for a new date
when her mom picks up the phone
