#15: Home May 21st, 2006
Download mp3 (3.7 MB) (or subscribe)
In the short time that I’ve been making music, and the shorter time that I’ve been trying to figure out how to give it away for free on the Internet, it has been my privilege to have made the acquaintance of a few people who, for one reason or another, seem to enjoy listening to it. As anyone who’s ever read the comments around here undoubtedly already knows, Nick May has pretty much established himself as the official SFoT trackback-and-comment maven-in-residence and fan-at-large. One thing about Nick is that he usually wants to know the backstory. About everything. Even if it doesn’t exist. Not that that’s ever really been an issue, considering that he has proven himself more than capable of making it up himself if necessary — but tonight, as it turns out, the song is preceded by the backstory that I wrote in a comment in his blog a couple hours ago. Or, at least, a backstory. Or, rather, one interpretation of one small part of one of any number of possible backstories, as filtered through two large mugs of strong coffee at the Red and Black this evening, along with franticness that increased at a rate inversely proportional to that of my decreasing battery charge as I tried to type it all out before my laptop died.
Now that I’m back at home and plugged in again, I can relax (well, sort of relax — man, they really don’t fuck around when they make that coffee, do they?) and tell some back-backstory: this is a cover of a song called “Home” that I did five years ago for Act 4, which was a Smashing Pumpkins tribute concert benefiting the Make-a-Wish Foundation. (Since I didn’t write it, the usual license doesn’t apply.) I kind of sucked when I played at the actual show, but this recording isn’t too bad, and it ended up on the accompanying tribute album that we made, the proceeds from which also went to Make-a-Wish. So there was that. I really like this song; I first heard it on a Pumpkins tour bootleg in my college dorm room when I was nineteen, and had to get up and run downstairs to the lounge at three in the morning to flail at the piano until I had figured out how I was going to play it. By the way, you can’t buy the original in any store; you can only get it in any of the numerous places where it’s given away, for free, on the Internet.
Thanks, always, for listening.
At 8:33 pm on May 22nd, 2006, unbottled soul » Blog Archive » Alert the 11 o’clock news! I’ve been blogged. wrote:
[…] My world is complete: Lindsey Kuper blogged about me. Well, sorta blogged about me. (Though, within the framework of Shoebox Full of Tapes (”A weekly podcast of songs I’m working on.”), I couldn’t become much more blogged about.) Well, sorta complete. […]
At 3:10 pm on May 24th, 2006, jes5199 wrote:
so I was deleting “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” from my nano ipod to have room for new mp3s, and i said, oh yeah, i should look at the new Shoebox track. and I thought that was funny.
At 1:59 pm on May 26th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Jes — Ha! Deleting Pumpkins records to make room for Pumpkins covers…it may not be the first time that’s happened.
I’m kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, here. Can’t wait to put up the new band stuff this weekend. As of yesterday, we’ve got a half-decent take of “Practice” and one or two others — now if I can just get GarageBand to stop sucking long enough to spit out a listenable mp3, I’m all set.
At 2:34 pm on May 28th, 2006, unbottled soul » Blog Archive » blog it while it happens wrote:
[…] One final word on Kuper—I never thought I’d hear myself saying this (well, at least not after having listened to a song for less than a few weeks…months straight), but I’m tired of I’ve worn out on Practice (v. 2) already. I just couldn’t keep listening to it, having to switch to looping other Lindsey (yay for alluding to a never-posted blog post called “looping Lindsey”…what was I saying about blogging hell?), Home. I think it’s because of the drums now or because I’ve listened to Practice in the past. Usually I can turn on Kuper and listen for an hour or two, just having my whole collection (which has nearly quadrupled!) on repeat and, though I’m loathe to admit it, usually tuning it out while I work. But! I do that w ith everything I listen to while I work. When I come up for air I listen. Or, in the case of Kuper, sing a few snatches. But it’s a worrying, albeit interesting, development. Or maybe the song’s so good, so intense you can’t keep looping it without building up a tolerance or a thick skin to it—so it’s wondrous intensity can’t affect you so quickly. […]